Every Certified Legal Nurse Consultant has suffered from a frozen phone. Whether it’s an Android® or an iPhone® – it freezes on start-up. Sometimes it freezes for a minute, sometimes longer and sometimes it requires a total reboot. What’s the cause? Well, the causes are many and diverse. The first involves the operating system and your apps. When you power your phone on it “checks in” to see if it needs to be updated. At the same time so do all your apps. If you use “push” notifications for email, Shazam, weather or apps that use location services, they’re all competing for your scarce resources the second your phone comes alive. All those apps can take a long time to check in and if one fails during the check-in, it may kill or affect other processes – all of which use up memory and time checking on, or waiting for, each other.
Even worse, Android phones especially tend to multitask, meaning that some apps continue to run in the background once you use them. They take up memory from the last time they were used until they’re either used again or killed off by the Android OS. Android is excellent for managing apps but some apps are coded more poorly than others and guess what? Those are the ones that slow down your phone.
iPhones, which tend not to multitask in a traditional sense, are a little better in that they don’t keep apps running in the background but switch back and forth between apps pretty quickly (in computer time). But, the more apps you have (especially location services and push apps), the longer it will take for your iPhone to settle down and get to a steady state.
So what’s a CLNC® consultant to do? First, don’t be in a hurry. Turn your phone on and give it a minute – while it’s booting get a cup of coffee, healthy green tea or some other calming, malt beverage. Second, while you wait, take a moment to meditate, say a prayer or plan your day. After a few minutes your phone will be up, running and as ready to rock as you are. If you need to turn your phone on to make an emergency call either plan ahead or grab a phone from someone nearby.
An alternative solution is to keep your phone on all day, every day (just keep it away from your sleeping space). If you choose this method, I still recommend rebooting it once a week to clear out memory leaks and keep it performing to its best.
Remember, phones, like husbands, depositions and paint drying, can’t be rushed. Successful CLNC consultants know that fact and understand it.
Keep on Techin’,
Tom
P.S. Comment and share how quickly or slowly your phone boots up and what you do while you’re waiting.
