Turn the Phone off and enjoy the Family and Life

There was a time in life, when people enjoyed relaxing and avoided answering the phone. Many people had rules about when you could call them – “You can call me up to 7:00 PM after that I’m putting the kids to sleep” or the famous phrase – “No calls at dinner time”. Think about it, dinner time is only 30-45 minutes long, is this rule so invasive that we can’t abide by it?

I remember when answering machines became popular and people would allow the machine to take a massage.  People sat on the couch allowing the phone to ring and in many cases, would listen to the message, but would take inconsideration what they were doing before returning the call.  People would actually finish eating dinner, play with their kids before they went to bed, and in many cases just relax and call the person back the next day.  I am pretty sure an immediate response has not prevent anybody from dying, getting fired, or going bankrupt.

Get back your personal life

We all want to be productive in our lives and to do this we must prioritize what is important and what isn’t.  To help us do this, we must learn to mute the phone and do what we need to make ourselves and family happy.  When I say put the phone down, that means no Internet browsing, texting, phone calls, IM, Facebooking, tweeting or any new social media fade that is happening at the moment.

Phone time management tools to help you get your personal time back

Most people don’t like to shut their cell phone off just for the simple reason is we forget to put it back on.  Here are a couple tools that will allow you to program you phone to automatically shut off all notifications’ and then turn them back on at set times.  You can program the phone to automatically turn the ringer off at 10:00 am on Tuesday for the weekly meeting and turn back on 1.5 hours later.

The program I use is Timeriffic (free App) which I use on my droid phone.  It’s simple to program and allows me to control WI-FI, message, text and voice notifications.  I can preset notifications to stop ringing after 7:30 pm and not to disturb me until 8:30 am.  A second program is called Tasker which is a paid App, but what I’ve heard it is worth the money.

So become creative with the technology at hand.  Automatically turn your phone off for an hour when you have important business to attend too; then have it turn back on hours later when you have 90 % of the project finished.  Program it to shut off all phone notifications on the drive home and not turn on after dinner.  Learn to manager your phone and you will be on the way to managing your life.