I’m done with office phones
After four years, I canceled my Vonage line on Friday. I only used 20 minutes per month on average over the last year, so it made sense in my case to ditch the service, even though it works fine. Instead, I will rely solely on Blackberry and Skype for voice chat, as I have done for personal use since 2003.
I have so far managed to cut back my phone use by only answering expected or known calls. I check voice mail as soon as I’m notified, and I have a policy of returning both calls and emails within two working hours.
I tell my professional contacts that email is “preferred,” and my cell phone is “secondary.” To further encourage asynchronous communication, I reward emailers with faster response times. It works cleverly well, and I’m one step closer to my goal of ditching web access for an entire year. Whatever it takes.
4 Comments
When you say ditch the Internet for a year, you mean the web portion of the Internet? And does that really mean you drop the monthly payment for Internet to your home? Email is still part of the Internet. So do you mean you will keep a data plan via Blackberry so you can continue to work via email? Very curious.
You are correct, Brooks. I will need to continue using email-only for work-related projects and plan on using Google SMS search, email subscriptions, and the like to fill in the information gaps. But no web, and ideally, batch process of emails at predetermined intervals.
Oh, and how could I forget my lovely Wikipedia access — that could prose a problem. Maybe I they’ll add sms/email search by that time.
Glad to see you putting the 4 hour work week in to action.