If you’ve read any of my posts that list the Kindle books that I have on my iPad, you’ll know one of them is the brilliantly written The Digital Diet by Daniel Sieberg which helped me reduce the amount of time I spend attached to my digital devices. I have read two great articles today, one talks about giving up email and the other talks to quitting using twitter*. While I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do that just yet, especially given that I’m the digital guy at M&C, but there has been one thing I gave up years ago and for much more practical reasons. I do not have email setup on my iPhone. By now you must think I am nuts, given that I travel a lot in my current role as National Creative Director.
Well it was pretty simple for me, I got hit with the extra data costs of downloading email the first month I got my first iPhone and I made a decision then to remove email off my phone and have simply not looked back since. Between my personal and work emails, I quite easily rack up over 200 mails a day, so you can just imagine what that costs to download and while I have set up wi-fi, just about everywhere I can, I still use a huge amount of data already when I have to resort to 3G. I believe mobile phones are already far too invasive, dog whistles for humans, call me and you’ll see how briefly I talk on the phone and I mostly only message people when I communicate. If you haven’t, give cutting out email on your mobile device a try, hell there is so much duplication between devices anyway, it frees up so much time, similar to how things were in the old days where you either answered your land line or you didn’t and people tried you later.
*link no longer valid