Not having a cell phone means that the world has to run on your time

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.

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.

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?

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

>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.

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.

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?

>"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!

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.

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.

"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....

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!").

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.

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).]

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.

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

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.

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

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?

I feel naked without my phone

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.