From the mouth of another blogger

In a world of email, Cell Phones, IM, SMS, and Blackberries its becoming exceedingly hard to avoid being reachable. There's always a sense of guilt associated with turning off the means of communication in your possession, and with the speed of how technology is moving this will continue to get worse.

For the last 6 months I've carried a Blackberry which is a pretty nifty toy, but what I noticed was that I've grown pretty used to constantly reaching whenever my device vibrates or rings signaling the arrival of new email, SMS, or voice call! Ignoring it exceedingly became a psychological challenge and I always felt unjustifiably pressured to respond to every form of communication I received. This included chatting with friends on Yahoo and Google while I was driving!

With this form of constant communication people around you expect you to be reachable 24/7. They also expect that you will respond to any thing they perceive as urgent regardless if it really is an emergency or not. They also get annoyed, dismayed, and outright hostile when they can't reach you! After all, they reason, aren't you carrying a Blackberry?

This is why I decided last week to kill the Blackberry! While I think it was really convenient and fun sometimes; it certainly came at a price I couldn't pay. That price was the eradication of the border between my personal and professional life, which is something I couldn't live with.

The funny thing is that people adapt pretty quickly. Now that everyone around me knows that I'm "Blackberryless" their expectations were very quickly adjusted and suddenly my life became a lot more enjoyable.

I can now:

- Enjoy my weekends and nights again.

- Check email only when I want to, as opposed to email "breaking & entering on my life"

- Be more attentive to people when they talk to me because I no longer have to continuously look at my device during conversations.

- Have a better chance of reaching home in one piece since I no longer chat & respond to email while driving.

- Have credible deniability when something goes wrong at work while I'm away! (grin)...

These are benefits of being Incommunicado and boy are they worth it....