Sometimes Procrastination Is a Good Thing Thinking Out Loud.Donald Noyes.20131002.20131116
Technology is so vast and so fast, that it is hard to keep up. It is impossible. Therefore:
Try running six years behind the "bleeding edge", finding mature, "Healed Technologies" with which to be occupied.
The advantage to this is that when you do so, you eliminate the multitudes of "blind-alleys" and mindless scurrying about to be the first and best (and most expensive) using the things that everybody "just has to have"
Much of today's technology is geared to the 2-second glimpse at what you don't need to see, just because you can!
Two-Thumbers can be seen in any modern active place, moving about, almost oblivious to what is physically present, being immersed in an addictive mind-numbing, continuous search for something, who knows what, instead of sensing and enjoying, and participating in what is going on around them.
A stand-off, stand-back approach which delays, procrastinates , waiting for things to settle down and for an approach which proves to be personally beneficial and results in a lasting, satisfactory outcome.
Another advantage to this is that you can buy the things which have proven "It Works" at a fraction of the price at which it was "introduced".
example: I bought a program called Database II some time ago, and it cost me 795.00 plus tax. today you can get database programs for little or nothing which far exceed its capabilities.
You can also buy the books about the technology which others have bought, not read, and then sold to "Less than Half-Price bookstores" for a fraction of what they paid for them, to be sold to others at about one-fifth the list-price.
Even technology that is Six-years-old can be modern-technology, and Six-year-old "It Works" Technology is worth learning about and applying.
But that is only if you want to have immersive exposure and utilization that has a time span measure of another six to ten years.
Running Six Years Behind is a strategy that allows for immersion rather than mere "flick of the finger" on a miniature ( be it 3 inch to 10 inch wide palm held device). Immersion can instead be via a Multiple Monitors, viewed in Wide-Screen, High-Definition and perhaps even in 3D, consisting of a sit-down, have a coffee, soft-drink, or glass of water experience.
I've said elsewhere that it takes about 5 to 7 years to "road test" a technology to know if it's both practical and reliable. Thus, six years is about the right number. -t
I made this guess in a rather unscientific manner. One of the sources I included was what people on the cutting and bleeding edge were saying about technology and its present and future potential. These could be found in informational you-tube-type videos. I then traced the related and associated people and their technologies backward a bit and then moving forward from that date to when the technology seems to have become mainstream or widely adopted, or had failed miserably. It turned out that it was about six to seven years. It is nice to know that you have said that it is about the right number
The dis-advantage is that people who are "road-testing" failing technologies for even one-half that time are are finding out what "doesn't work" have valuable career time stripped away. Observers and Procrastinators on the other hand avoid some of that kind of time-wasting.
I would like to see an evaluative site on the internet which would track technologies and group them based using independent measuring sticks and discovering technologies which seem to be heading into categories like ''which indicate promise, have the potential to be earth shakers, those which have been disappointing so far, and those failing, or have already been made obsolete, to mention a few off the top of my head. Also classified as to their target audiences or users.
I have been using Google Trends as a tool for this purpose. Anything that drops below 50% of its peak is no longer hot. Anything that drops below 5% of its peak is probably dead. Stable technologies tend to range between 10% and 20% of their peak.
for checking out:
Comparison with related topics: www.google.com 
Kind of like an internet version of a reporting style similar to the old-time magazine called "Consumer's Reports". One might call it technologyreports.com . (entered as a Wanted Site, now a parked site for sale)
Examples:
Photographs and Immersion
an interesting applicable technology which may work nicely even though it began in 2006-2007
See original on c2.com