Unwire Your Life: A Challenge

Call me old-fashioned, out of touch, or whatever else you’d like but the fact is: I don’t own a Blackberry, iPhone, or any other type of PDA.  I know what you might be thinking now, because I used to think the same way: “How in the world do you survive without being alerted the second you get an email, or Facebook update?!  How in the world do you function without an email alert from your calendar to let you know you have a new event on your daily schedule?!”  Not too long ago, I, too, craved the latest technology to keep me up to date and boost my productivity.  Little did I know that a whiteboard, a pen and a piece of paper would do more for my productivity than any of the latest smartphones, with their fancy internet, email, and planners.  As I’ve made the moves to unwire my life, I’ve noticed that I’ve become less stressed out, less anxious, and overall, more productive.

Nowadays, I use a simple flip-phone without all the bells and whistles.  I check my email 2, maybe 3, times a day.  I limit my web surfing to specific times.  I have a whiteboard with a calendar hanging on my closet door with long-term dates and deadlines and I use those pens and pads of paper that you get whenever you stay at a hotel to keep lists of daily or short-term to-do lists.  That’s the extent of my planning system.  There’s no jam packed digital calendar always sending me reminders.  There are no updates every time someone posts on my Facebook wall.  What there is, instead, is peace of mind.

For lack of a better term, I’ll call all these constant interruptions headache inducers. By taking steps and measures to reduce or eliminate these constant interruptions, I’ve become more and more relaxed and efficient.

Talk About a Headache

Here are some practical tips to unwire your life and a few challenges to help you win back some of that peace of mind:

1) Check your email no more than 3 times a day and never at the beginning of the day: This is a great idea I got from reading The Four Hour Workweek. When you take the time to think about it, almost all your emails don’t require an immediate response. If someone really needed to get in touch with you at that instant, he or she would pick up the phone and. Why, then, are we so obsessed with responding to every email as soon as we get it? Constantly checking your email is one of the top ways to waste time online. Instead, designate 2 or 3 times a day when you’ll check your inbox. During these two time slots, deal with all the emails that need attention or make a note of when you will deal with one requiring a more detailed reply. For me, I usually check after lunch and after dinner, and sometimes later at night.

Why shouldn’t you check first thing in the morning? First, it distracts you from focusing on the important task you’ve planned to work on. Second, casually checking your email often leads to casual web surfing, which often leads to precious time flying by without notice or any real accomplishment. If you’re a bit skeptical at first, create an auto-response email saying something along the lines of, “Thank you for contacting me. In order to increase my productivity, which in turn benefits you, I’ll be checking my email at 12 and 4pm. If this is an urgent matter that requires immediate attention, please call me at (123) 456-7890.” Try it out and you’ll be amazed at how much time you’ll save and how much more you get done.

2) Freedom: Freedom is an amazing application for Mac users that I recently learned about thanks to a guest post on the Get Rich Slowly blog by Ramit of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.  (Coincidentally, these two of my favorite blogs and I highly-recommended both of them.)  Basically, for Mac-users, Freedom disables your Internet connection so that you can’t access it for however many minutes you designate (up to 8 hours).  It resists any and all temptation to mindlessly browse the Internet, as you simply can’t get Internet access.  For you PC users, have no fear, just disable your internet access manually.  It’s easier to undo than Freedom, but its still a barrier to getting to the Internet.  That extra time you’ll have to spend to overcome the barrier is often enough time to help you realize whether or not you’ll be spending your time wisely.

3) Leave the cell phone on silent or leave it behind completely: A few weeks ago, I decided to attempt something ludicrous: I would go a whole day without my cell phone.  As you may have surmised, I somehow managed to survive.  It was my most productive day of that week and an experience that has literally changed my life.  I used to feel the need to constant text somebody, anybody.  With no phone, there was no temptation to do such a thing, and, coincidentally, I realized that I could do without hat constant distraction.  Nowadays, I have my phone on silent most of the time or on vibrate if I’m expecting a call.  Most times, I just keep it in my backpack so I have it in case of emergency.

4) Take a pad of paper and pen for a test drive: Instead of cramming everything into your Blackberry calendar, write out your projects for the week on a piece of loose-leaf paper.  Cut up any projects and designate them to the days that week you intend to work on them.  For example, for a paper, you may choose to develop a topic on Monday, outline on Wednesday, and write the first draft on Thursday.  Now, Sunday night, grab that piece of loose-leaf paper and another piece of paper and draft up a schedule for Monday.  Write down the goals for the day and set aside time slots for each.  If you’re feeling ambitious write down some of Tuesday’s goals in case you find extra time.  As you finish each task or find the need to rearrange your schedule, cross it off or reschedule it right on that piece of paper.  At the end of the day, sit down to make Tuesday’s schedule and repeat.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll find satisfaction in being able to see your goals on paper and watch as you cross them off one by one.

The challenge, then, is this: try all of these for a week, or at the very least a day.  I’m confident you’ll find at least one of them an effective way to increase your productivity and decrease the stress of always being “wired.”

Got any productivity tips to share?  Post ‘um!