Spending time offline

For the twenty years or so, my career has required me to be generally available at any time. Before that, I was on call for many years for support issues. Having the pager or the department mobile still gave a lot of freedom, but it did startle my friends when my pager would go off in my purse when I was playing the organ at church and not sitting there. One of the weekend IT staff would reboot all the servers on Sunday morning, including one that paged me when it went down. In all those pages, only once was it an actual issue I had to leave to deal with.

In the next position, I worked from home and definitely was connected most of the time. I was the only manager who was usually available, and I was often called by the Asian help desk in the middle of the night to help deal with an escalation of a problem. We also had rotating staff meetings with prime time in England, Australia, or California. That would mean meetings at 2am. Having Internet access for these meetings was important although many were simply phone conferences.

Moving on, I had a mobile with my email routed to it. That means even more connectivity as cell service is so ubiquitous. It was convenient, but too easy to always check. Then, it was regular video conferencing, including supporting calls in Europe in the early morning hours.

These two decades of being constantly available have taught me a number of things that are important to my sense of well being. One is that it is too easy to be constantly connected. There is always one more thing to do. It is critical to set limits. For me, that means:
1) No email on my phone
2) Do not spend my entire weekend online
3) Do not get online until after working out 
4) Turn off the phone at night.

I check Facebook on the weekends but do not often post much then. And I usually only check once each day instead of multiple time.

This time unplugged from outside helps me refocus on things internal. Many people are constantly connected. It becomes an addiction. If you are always connected however, you are not really living your life. You are watching it instead. I believe that we are meant to be doers and not spectators in our lives. We need to get out and live, so I set limits to force myself to do that.