Give Up The Smartphone?

[matthew.brough]

I've been considering for a while getting rid, or seriously limited my 'connected' time. I've never been a lover of phones but I feel obsessed by my smartphone. Email on phones was the worst idea ever and guaranteed constant harassment.

Has anyone here actually considered going cold turkey and completely dissing their smartphone in favour of a landline and if you're out and about, tough, you're not contactable like in the old days when we all coped perfectly well?

The thought us starting to sound more and more attractive. It's ridiculous, that thing might as well be part of my skin as it's always attached to it. Last thing I look at when I got I bed and within seconds if being awake, first thing I look at. Ridiculous behaviour but a quick google search shows I am far from alone.

Anyone else's life been taken over by their phone?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/smartphones-are-the-devil

[alterEGO]

If I'm out of the office you rarely get an email reply from me and never at the weekend. I leart pretty quick that customers are like pets, they need to be trained.

[matthew.brough]

That's the next thing on my hit list. I have outlook open all the time and it flashes up messages in the bottom right of my screen which distracts me from what I'm doing. Exchange made all that push style email great however, on reflection, the old days when you had to login and it said 'you've got mail' then you dealt with it all in one hit rather that individually as it came in. People now use email like instant messaging, me included. My inbox has 66000 emails and we only went to exchange in 2012 so that's over 30000 emails a year or 80 ish a day. That's ridiculous. If they were letters I'd needs 3 people to open and reply to them all.

[MrHappy]

I just sent Matt a text & got a reply....

 

I just sent some emails in the last hr, request price for an item, remittance advice & cost for job.

 

I expect them to answer during working hrs.

 

My email is on a desktop, oftend I do stuff out of hrs & delay it being sent until 9am the next working day

[matthew.brough]

He ain't joking.

#cactus

My email is on a desktop, oftend I do stuff out of hrs & delay it being sent until 9am the next working day

Why delay?

[MrHappy]

Why delay?

you want a email for a price, invoice or request to service on your smart phone ?

[matthew.brough]

If I chose to have it delivered to my smartphone then I'd accept if I hadn't disabled the notifications then yes.

It ain't just me. Every time an alarm group of one of our alarms is set an email, text or both gets sent to the end user, this messaging server wasn't redundant at the time as it's not mission critical. We disabled it for an upgrade and took it offline for 1/2 an hour and the barrage of support calls that came in because the email hadn't been received confirming set blew me away. It really did. We now have support tickets rises if that email has to arrived within 5 seconds of setting the alarm. It's never our fault but we have to look into them. Usually the phone doesn't have push or poor coverage but the lack of message gets end users very nervous.

[Cubit]

I just get selective with both calls and emails.

I work on the basis that emails are just a modern day postman pat. Therefore no rush to respond.

[matthew.brough]

I have just bought myself a 2nd iToy. I'm going to try leaving work phone at work and my phone for my time and see if this hybrid solution works.

I think what's hard is when people have been used to instantaneous responses when you then don't its hard managing the new expectation. I'm also considering an enforced ban on email and phone use outside engineers work schedules so they can't use the device until maybe a couple of hours before and after their work hours.

[datadiffusion]

I'm with Dave unless warranty or trade on here i may very well work out of hours but always set to delay send until working hours on outlook. Makes customers realise not to expect instant replies 24/7 on non critical stuff.