“What? You are insane.”
Those were the words my wife spoke to me when I told her I didn’t want a cell phone. Actually, I’ll be completely honest, I’m one of those d-bags that had their iPhone drown in a pool (in order to save this ugly/cute thing). Though, to my credit, I didn’t create a Facebook group for it.
My wife was shocked when I told her I no longer even wanted a phone. And, who could blame her? A cell phone is something everyone–seriously–everyone uses in this day and age. You’ve gotta be a whack job to ditch your cell phone, right? Heck yes (in Napoleon Dynamite voice).
And that’s what I did.
“How are people going to get a hold of you?” she asked.
“That’s the whole point. I don’t want people to get a hold of me.”
[Pause]
“I want to get a hold of you.”
“That’s fine,” I compromised. “You and family will be the only ones that will be able to reach me. The rest of the calls will go straight to voice-mail and email. I’ll call people back on a house phone, or send them a thought-out response via email.”
It’s been over a month since I’ve given up my cell phone. The difference isn’t as astonishing as you may think. The day definitely seems calmer and more focused; but more than anything, the best part about not having a cell phone centers on the reliance on one’s own self.
When I had an iPhone in my pocket, I never had to prepare for anything. That thing was my escape–and, oh, what a beautiful escape it was. When I would travel, I’d simply use the iPhone’s GPS for mapping out directions. I’d use Yelp in order to find great restaurants around me. I’d take a wizz while reading tech buzz through Google Reader. I’d avoid people standing in line at a starbucks while checking email.
It was a great device. It was a horrible device.
In the next five years, you’ll see a major shift in our society where everyone is connected always. It’s already begun, some people are always connected. In the future, everyone will be connected. It’s almost like a movie if you stop to think about it. Big brands are feeding us devices that are constantly monitoring us; constantly distracting us, and constantly allowing people to stare into the abyss of the internet wherever they may be.
Really, people will be living two-lives: one real; one virtual. We are moving towards a half-life society. A moving cloud that syncs your online life with your mobile life and disguises itself in beautiful hardware.
At the end of the day, there’s no point in fighting the surge of mobile technology. We are all going to be connected. We’re going to be watched. We’re going to be tweeting our lives away until we’re six feet under.
From my perspective, the best thing to do is to become aware of this shift. In my mind, there’s three options you can take regarding mobile devices:
I. Go all in
Get an iPhone, download a ton of apps, tack on a $100 phone bill and escape into the world of constant connectivity in the cloud.With the rise of android phones, you can obviously go that route, as well.
II. The balance act
Get a phone that does one thing: acts like a phone and doesn’t connect to the internet. A phone that simply makes phone calls.
III. Ditch the phone
This one’s simple: ditch your phone.
I’ve ditched my phone; however, in the case of emergency, I have a phone that I can break open like a fire extinguisher. I never turn it on. It’s essentially an emergency phone.
People
Why have I elected to do this? Because of one thing: people. Life revolves around people. However, it does not revolve around me getting interrupted or distracted by people–or more importantly, by the internet and apps. One gets distracted by the internet already on the computer; why bring this distraction with them everywhere? My objective in giving up the cell phone is to become closer to people. If you called me today, you’d think my phone was disconnected. It has an annoying disconnect beep and no answering machine. I don’t get missed calls and I don’t get voice-mails. And it feels great.
When Google Voice comes out, I’ll have messages forward to my email. And if it makes sense for us to meet, we’ll meet up face-to-face for coffee.
Different tools, for different fools
If I told my mom to ditch her phone in order to get more productive, she’d laugh at me. “How will I be able to chat with my friends and take clothes back at Nordstroms?” she’d say.
Sorry mom, you’re right. And a lot of people don’t have a problem using their cell phone as a cell phone.
Some people use the phone and achieve it’s core purpose: to speak with people.
In my specific case, giving up the phone was geared towards disconnecting from the internet. I wanted to extinguish constant email checking, tweet checking, new app downloads and finding retarded blog posts to kill time.
The future is less
I’m writing this the day of the anticipated Apple tablet release. I expect that it will blow away all preconceived expectations. It’s going to be amazing. It’s going to accomplish many objectives. Yet, it’s going to be outdated. Why? Because as a society, we’ll be moving towards an age of constant connectivity. It’s only a matter of time until one discovers that being constantly connected isn’t healthy for focus–for getting things done. It’s a prevents focus.
Paul Graham, a modern day polymath, is the founder of Y-Combinator. He’s an investor, entrepreneur, programmer and artist. On the subject of devices and distractions, he writes:
I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it’s the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)
My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough. When I have to sit on the other side of the room to check email or browse the web, I become much more aware of it. Sufficiently aware, in my case at least, that it’s hard to spend more than about an hour a day online.
And my main computer is now freed for work. If you try this trick, you’ll probably be struck by how different it feels when your computer is disconnected from the Internet. It was alarming to me how foreign it felt to sit in front of a computer that could only be used for work, because that showed how much time I must have been wasting.
The concept of disconnecting from devices that have the internet is becoming a common theme for successful developers, designers and programmers. After experiencing the iPhone’s multi-use power, I also came face-to-face with the innate ability it wields to distract one from getting work done. It’s my thesis and my belief that the future of success rests on devices that have one function–not many. The future is less. I’ll be elaborating on this in the next chapter and will be conducting various interviews with those that actually get work done online. What you’ll find will surprise you. Paul Graham’s technique is a lot more common than you may have thought.
In the next chapter, I’ll be showing you how to audit your devices and prune those that hurt you more than they help you.
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