

Not having a cell phone means that the world has to run on your time - edw519
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38646066/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

======
njharman
It's less about having/not having 'foo' and more about letting or not letting
'foo' dominate your life. In the case of cell phones 'foo' is the cellphone as
well as all the people trying to contact you through it.

I never answer a call I don't recognize, I check the vmail afterwards. If they
don't leave one, oh well guess they didn't need to talk to me that bad.

I often don't anser the phone when someone I know does call, I check the
vmaili afterwards. If they don't leave one, oh well guess they didn't need to
talk to me that bad. OTHOH if they call again right away I assume it's
important and answer. There's a parable "Boy who cried Wolf" applicable to
those who abuse this.

(smart)phone is external memory, camera, notebook, calendar, email, gps, some
other stuff and a mostly outbound telephone.

It's massively useful, it has an off switch.

~~~
mmt
_It's less about having/not having 'foo' and more about letting or not letting
'foo' dominate your life. In the case of cell phones 'foo' is the cellphone as
well as all the people trying to contact you through it._

I couldn't agree more. This problem appears to date back to landline phones,
as well. Telemarketers can't interrupt one at dinner if on simply doesn't
answer the phone.

Insisting on not having 'foo' at all times states that, at no time, will 'foo'
be desireable, and that stretches credibility.

With effectively ubiquitous text messaging, which is asynchronous like email,
the whole "operate on your time" argument falls apart.

------
evilduck
The "what about emergencies?" issue comes up quite a bit, I thought I'd share
my perspective. Having been in a few actual life or death emergency situations
in my personal life and formerly being a police dispatcher, I've been on both
ends of this.

You don't need to be immediately reached by phone in these events unless you
can actually do something about it. Calling 911 and attending to the emergency
trumps calling me at unless I'm close enough to help, i.e. walking the dog, at
the neighbor's house, etc. If I have to drive to get there, it's too far; call
me after things have stabilized.

If it's a call to break bad news, the last thing you should be doing in the
event of tragic news is hopping in a car a driving somewhere while you're an
emotional wreck. Racing to the hospital in an attempt to get in "your last
words" is dangerous and is not as fulfilling as you might hope. Live in such a
way that you're at peace with everyone you care about and last words are not
needed.

Also, in my own ability to cope with events, simply receiving news that
someone died is the easiest. Being there and witnessing someone die is far
harder (or visiting them every day in the hospital until they die...even if
you aren't there when it happens), and the hardest for me was performing CPR
on someone and the person dying anyways (it helped me to learn later from the
autopsy that CPR was never going to help, but it's still traumatic to me in a
way that the other events weren't).

In short, real emergencies happen too quickly for a call to non-emergency
services to be of any help, worrying about those situations is a waste of your
time, and it's possible if you're like me, that actually being there is worse
than not being there. Business emergencies are a different beast though.

~~~
pardo
The way I see it, the "what about emergencies?" argument is not so much about
someone in an emergency being able to reach you to ask for help or to inform
you.

It's a matter of YOU having a phone to make an emergency call to 911 when/if
you have the need.

~~~
evilduck
Ahh, well I carry a cellphone, but tend not to answer it. Whenever I've had
the conversation, it was always about being reached, not making the 911 call.

(Edit: I guess you're personal behavior will probably dictate which
conversation you have, reach-ability vs. emergency services).

------
dingy
Seriously, what is it with you yanks?

"I used [something most people use] every minute of every day, but I decided
to stop using [that something] alltogether and now I feel [free/empowered/at
peace/intellectually stimulated/etc]."

What about moderation?

~~~
ghurlman
The key here isn't that you aren't carrying a cellphone... it's that the
people trying to contact you know you aren't carrying a cellphone.

~~~
trafficlight
You don't have to answer every single call. I carry my phone all the time but
I don't answer calls from unknown numbers. A lot of times I don't answer calls
from friends either. They know I'll get back to them when I feel like it.
Nobody has ever gotten their feelings hurt because of it.

------
rue
A common factor of these famous people who do not use a cell phone: they have
at least one assistant/secretary.

~~~
ryandvm
Not at all. In almost all cases, it's a self-maintained illusion that the
people that call you cannot wait for a few minutes or hours to hear back from
you.

Sure, it might be annoying to someone that they didn't get to talk to you, but
rarely does it actually make a difference.

~~~
sprout
Text messaging wastes far less time, and leaves time for more interesting
pursuits than trying to quickly, extemporaneously, condense the purpose of
your call into the space allotted by voicemail.

Without my Droid, my conversations would consist of a lot more bookkeeping.

~~~
mattmichielsen
I prefer to treat text messaging like email, where I don't read it as soon as
it is received. In fact, using Google Voice, my text messages ARE emails.
People get used to and usually respect the fact that I have more important
things to do that constantly reply to their queries.

------
sprout
>The only person his habit seems to annoy is his wife. "She wants to do things
on the fly. I'm of the mindset that we can avoid that just by planning. I say,
'Katy, I'll be home at 7 or 7:30,' and she says, 'Let's talk about it later.'"

I'm with his wife. Life's too short to script my time. Maybe when I'm his age
I'll mellow out a bit, but until then I like texting a friend and grabbing a
late-night bite to eat then doing something absurd.

------
ryandvm
Absolutely. I managed to successfully evade cell phone ownership for years and
it was dramatically empowering. It also made me develop a pretty strong
distaste for our cultural addiction to instant communication.

In fact, it's become at least a small part of my definition of success. I am
not a concierge. I do not await phone calls with the longing of a teenager on
Friday night. My peace and leisure cannot be disturbed at random. And most
importantly, my interactions with the people in my present can not rudely be
put on pause for just any reason.

I have never had a call in my life that could not wait a few minutes. If you
have many of those, I'd suggest that someone (not necessarily you) needs to
revisit some aspect of their infrastructure design.

Sadly I was finally lured into the mobile masses by the prospect of smartphone
application development. Though I am at least able to rationalize it with the
thought that it's not so much a phone as it is a tiny personal computer that I
can distract myself with whenever _I_ want.

~~~
skip
Like any other development tool, you can leave the smartphone on your desk. No
need to carry it around.

~~~
sokoloff
One could, but I think part of being a good app developer is understanding how
people use the platform. Just like Boeing needs pilots, Ford needs drivers,
etc.

Imagine trying to develop a web application if you only used a browser on your
own development and production website (ie: that you otherwise "left it on
your desk")

------
jgoewert
So, what I learned from this article is:

If you are stinking rich or important and have an assistant, you don't need a
cell phone because your assistant will have their cellphone and you can take
it when you need it or have your assistant call someone.

I'm in shock!

Sorry, Charlie, I plan to keep mine.

If I can't find someplace, I need the maps on my phone or the ability to call
someone. I can't just lean over to my driver and say "Take me there."

If my plans change, finding a pay phone is impossible. One time, my car ran
out of gas. I was broke and couldn't buy any at the time. I thought it would
go 3 more miles. So I started walking home and figured if I saw a payphone I
would use it. I didn't want to impose on some store's line to call my wife.
Would you believe that after passing 3 gas stations, 4 fast food places, and
more along an entire strip, there wasn't a single payphone?

------
Setsuna
>"In India, even the yak herders and rickshaw drivers have cell phones"

It still amazes me as how much improvement the mobile phone has brought to the
low income workers in third world countries!

~~~
patio11
20 percent plus in income for some occupations, such as fishing in some areas.
That makes cell service probably the most effective poverty abatement program
I can name.

------
roc
I disagree that it necessarily makes the world run on your time.

All it does, is make the default method of communication _asynchronous_ and
forces synchronous communication to be scheduled.

It doesn't "make the world run on your time", unless you're still using a
phone to interrupt other people with unscheduled synchronous communication.

The responsible way to ditch the interruptions and improve focus is to shift
_your own_ communication to asynchronous methods and expectations as well.

I leave my phone on silent (no ring. no vibe.) unless I'm expecting a
particular call. I think it's vastly less rude of me to make an unscheduled
caller wait until I make time to answer a message than for that caller to have
presumptuously attempted to interrupt my day with an unscheduled call or
"emergency" email they demand an instant response to.

I have yet to work out a good way for _actual_ emergency notifications to ring
through. But until phones provide a good solution to that[1], I'll err on the
side of being more productive every single day in exchange for running the
risk of being 'out of contact' in the event of an actual emergency.

[1] I've tried setting my default ringer to dead air and setting a custom
ringtone for my wife. But that doesn't let me easily flip the ringer back on
for when I'm expecting a scheduled call. And I'd still like an email client
that will let me set a custom alert rule based on contact. I'd rather not run
a second email client to watch an 'emergency' mailbox.

~~~
gaius
Absolutely it doesn't make the world run on your time. Being contactable by
mobile if your friends expect to be able to is basic politeness. I mean, if
we're waiting for a train and one of our group is late and they call/pick up
when we call them, we can make a plan, to wait for the next one or meet
somewhere else. If not, I don't think it's reasonable to expect telepathy to
work... We're gone.

~~~
roc
Situations like that are precisely why I prefer an easily-switchable behavior
to simply not carrying a phone.

"Meeting up" is precisely the kind of time when I have my phone set to ring.

It's silent during my normal daily routine or when I'm with all the people I
planned to be with. (out of respect for _our_ time together)

------
prs
For years I was conditioned to pick up the phone as soon as it rang. Growing
older, I realized this to be the wrong approach. Today, most calls end up in
my voicemail.

Lessons learned:

\- Urgency is typically defined in terms of the calling party. In most cases,
it dissolves into something that did not warrant my attention in the first
place.

\- Interruptions _will_ take away from the task at hand and result in
decreased personal productivity.

~~~
mmt
_For years I was conditioned to pick up the phone as soon as it rang._

I'm extremely curious as to how this happened. I doubt I was conditioned, but
I never felt the obligation to answer a ringing telephone. Perhaps this was a
consequence of being a first-generation immigrant from a country without
ubiquitous phones?

------
jdlegg
"Lud must have been here."

This reminds me of an essay by Thomas Pynchon: "Is it OK to be a Luddite."
Possibly posted to HN recently.

[http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite....](http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html)

Pynchon's point seems to be that the Luddites were not opposed to technology
for the reasons we commonly imagine: fear of change, fear of submission to the
machine, fear of obsolescence.

Instead, Ned Lud (an historically obscure, possibly fictional character) was a
Hero who stood up to and mocked the machinery of a ruling class. Machinery
that, incidentally, put many human beings out of work.

Ludditism was more a sideshow act in an evolving campaign of class-warfare.
But also a kind of myth.

Cell phones are interesting in this context because they're a double-edged
sword. They are both liberating and totalitarian. To give up your cell phone
is to avoid the demands of possible higher-ups, but also risk missing timely
receipt of profitable information ("The stock market's crashing, sell
quick!").

------
glhaynes
Everybody knows I carry a phone but they also know that I don't answer it if I
can't or don't want to. I have no problem with letting someone go to voicemail
if I can't or don't want to talk on the phone right then... me carrying around
a device that allows me to be connected whenever I want doesn't obligate me to
actually be connected at any particular point. If they need me urgently, they
should leave a second voicemail or, preferably, send me a text.

------
edw519
I stopped carrying my cell phone to theaters because I kept forgetting to put
in on vibrate.

I stopped carrying my cell phone to business meetings because I didn't want to
be distracted by the vibrating.

I stopped carrying my cell phone to restaurants because I wanted the people I
was with to think that no one was more important than them while we were
together.

I stopped carrying my cell phone to my mother's because she outranks anyone
who could possibly call.

Except for travel, I stopped carrying my cell phone altogether.

I'm not sure I would go the the extreme of no cellphone like some of OP's
examples, but I'm getting closer.

Now, the only reason I have a cell phone instead of a land line is for travel
and emergencies.

[Aside: I _love_ the idea of a voice mail greeting that asks the caller to
email me instead. But I won't do it. It just seems like a rude way to treat
someone who bothered to call. I'll keep checking voice mail (sigh).]

~~~
patio11
There are a couple of voicemail transcription services available, or you can
use Twilio. I suggest language like "For quickest response, please spell me
your email address."

~~~
may
Google Voice transcribes voicemail. A bit hit-and-miss sometimes, but decent
(and, presumably, getting better with more data).

~~~
ghurlman
You're being generous... it seems as if their service is worse off now than it
was when GrandCentral ran the place.

~~~
orangecat
For me it's usually both accurate enough to get the gist of the message, and
inaccurate enough for a good laugh.

------
elbenshira
I always have my cell on either silent or vibrate mode. This frees me from
unwanted distractions. But there is one slight problem to this whole "free
your time" deal: your friends might get annoyed at the delayed response.

But I think they've gotten used to my behavior. Maybe.

------
saint-loup
This way of thinking is kinda like "who will be the worst jerk, me or the guys
trying to contact me?"

------
Fargren
Until two months ago, I had been cellphone-less for over a year. People around
me knew this, and were often bothered by it, but most of them understood that
it was my decision and that it didn't seriously impair me at working in the
world. I was still very reachable by mail and MSN, as well as my home phone.
Knowing that I have absolute choice about when I'm reachable and that people
know that I may not be reachable at some times was profoundly gratifying. What
bothers me most about my cell phone is that people assume that I'll have it
with me at all times, and that I'll pick it up if called. I haven't found a
better way to kill this assumption than not having a phone.

------
Shorel
Way too extreme. You can have a cell phone and still make the world run on
your time.

------
mattchew
I've never had a cellphone of my own. My wife carries a TracFone which we use
for a few minutes a month ("I'm running late" kind of calls), and once in a
while I borrow it.

It's not a power play. I've just never felt like I needed one. I watch other
people's "relationships with their cell phones" and I'm happy to skip it.

Also, people interrupt _having sex_ to answer the phone? What the hell is
wrong with you people?

------
adamilardi
I feel naked without my phone

------
Goladus
The world has to run on your time, unless the world can happily ignore you.

------
ulysses
I'd love to turn my cellphone ringer off, but it's not really practical for a
sysadmin.

And once I'm available 24/7 for work, I become available for anyone else that
has that number.

~~~
mmt
_And once I'm available 24/7 for work,_

As a sysadmin, this is why I pretty much always insist on an on-call rotation
and escalation. Humans can't actually be available 24x7.

It's also not a foregone conclusion any more than a single cellphone has only
one number. Google Voice has made call forwarding an inexpensive proposition.

~~~
ulysses
The higher you are up the escalation pyramid, the more available you have to
be (though you are hopefully bothered less often).

Of course humans can't be "always" available, but there can be a (self-
imposed) obligation to be as available as possible. Personally, I turn my
phone off in theaters and museums, and at weddings and funerals.

I've considered setting up multiple numbers, but haven't yet.

~~~
mmt
_there can be a (self-imposed) obligation_

Unimpose. That's all there is to the liberation promised by not carrying a
cellphone.

------
exception
I used to be highly addicted to cell phones in the '90's.

In 2005 I spent a year working overseas. When I got back I just never got
around to buying a new phone. I have to say, it has been extremely liberating.

So much so that we went one further - we don't answer our land-line either
unless it's someone we know _and_ we don't check voice mail.

I also don't wear a watch and go to sleep/get up whenever my body tells me to
rather than stick to a strict schedule.

You can reach me via email, MSN, GoogleTalk, Skype or hey, knock on my door
and say hello!

~~~
Shorel
I use my cell phone a lot more for GoogleTalk than for calls.

In fact I have a data plan that has no call minutes. If I want to make a call,
I can buy a prepaid card or call from other phone.

------
ZachPruckowski
This works great if you're in a job where they can afford to not get back to
someone immediately. For people in a situation where they're really playing
for the breaks (which is most young people trying to get established, and
especially entrepreneurs), you can't afford to take more than a few hours to
get back to people.

~~~
skip
Unless you are saving lives (a doctor) or protecting the country (in defense),
or maybe a few other edge cases, the perception that you need to get back to a
person in a few hours is probably more on your end than on the recipient's.

~~~
ig1
Or need to fix your production servers which have suddenly crashed and every
minute of downtime is costing you money and reputation. A category many people
on HN probably fall into.

------
trebor
I still remember the days before cellular phones. My dad even had one of those
early car phones, it had an awesome speaker phone, but used it infrequently.
As soon as he got a work cell phone the interruptions came.

I'm no luddite, but that doesn't mean I like cellular phones.

------
oscardelben
I moved to a new country one week ago and I thought that I would have needed a
new sim card for my cellphone. To my surprise, after a week I still see no
reason for having a cellphone with ne. I feel more free now and I'm not sure
I'm going to use a cellphone anytime soon.

------
etherael
I keep a mobile, I just don't give anyone my number unless I am prepared to
have them interrupt me at any time, this list currently includes two people. I
have a decoy number that routes straight to voicemail that I can give people
if it would be otherwise strange not to give it to them.

