Pictured above: professional gadget blogger Charlie Sorrel’s cell phone. No foolin’.
In a display of the same breathtaking journalistic resilience which has become the corner stone of his Wired career, Gadget Lab’s Charlie Sorrel abandoned his quest to go a week without a cellphone within mere hours.
Still the results of this imaginary week without a cell phone is a decent read, mostly since it edges away from the more Ludditical extreme of smashing your cell phone with a hobnailed boot, instead concentrating at more reasonable, easy-to-adopt habits aimed at making a cell phone less of an insistent, constantly slurping sanity sucker.
I have locked the phone to only accept calls from designated numbers. That way I can keep the phone on without it ringing off the hook. I can also make calls to anyone I like, but unless they are on my whitelist, their calls won’t get through.
The other trick, and something I have been doing for years now, is to ignore my voicemail. I should probably switch it off entirely so callers don’t I’m actually going to listen to their rambling messages, but my close friends know that they shouldn’t bother. They send an SMS instead. Think of this as “Visual Voicemail”, only it works on every phone, not just the iPhone.
It’s common sense, of course, but that’s one of the truly great things of living in the age of mobile communication and caller ID: having a phone with you at all times doesn’t necessarily mean you must always be contactable, just that you have the luxury of picking and choosing the calls you do want to answer. All it takes is some mental training.
A Week Without A Cellphone [Gadget Lab]
The least people can do is check their missed call logs and listen to the voice mail of important callers. I for one don’t really have a cell phone and it annoys me to no end when people don’t listen to their voice mail. Even if I did have a personal cell phone I wouldn’t want to have to send a text message just to talk to someone. I mean if I’m going to talk to them then I’m going to fucking call them.
I’m in agreement with the idea of not taking every call – but not checking your voice mail? That seems pretty silly.
The message on my voicemail says “Do Not Leave a message, I will not listen to it. I already know you called, and if your number is blocked, tough shit. I don’t answer blocked calls anyway.”
My mom is so proud.
Though I disagree with the basic premise of screening calls. Life goes much smoother if you answer the phone when it rings. It saves time, the person that calls is generally impressed that you’re on top of things (when in a work setting), and there’s just too much phone tag these days anyway.
I went from a Palm to an LG Rumor and have been very happy with the down-grade. I use my phone as just a phone (not a toy or a media hub) and use SMS more for quick messages.
With e-mail, SMS and voicemail, unless Rome is falling or the four horsemen are riding I don’t see the need to instantly respond to everything. Even for business, the people who hover over their crackberries and reply to everything RIGHTNOWOMG tend to miss details and, in my experience, end up revising more often than if they’d gotten the message, thought and then replied.
I find it amusing that these sort of things can be revelations to some people if only because my mindset has been like this from the beginning. Before my cell phone I screened via answering machine, often silencing my phone and often only returning calls not answering a ringing phone. Before my first answering machine I would sometimes answer the phone and simply say ‘call again later if its important’ and then hang up. Taking control of who you communicate with and how you do it is something everyone should do and on their own terms.
I love that his flip-phone is still able to ring off the hook.