M.S.: Yeah everybody in social media and such tells me I need it. I probably will, but I'm just saying in terms of the boundaries, we all have to make our personal boundaries and another one I have is I very rarely respond to professional emails after certain hour of night, I might choose to write them but I don't send them because when it's a personal duty, I don't want the person on the other line to feel an obligation to respond.
Rob: You know, you got me thinking when I read that in the book. I liked it because people expect it. I published a website that reaches a couple 100,000 unique people a month, people email me all times of the day, weekends, holidays and they expect a response right away. They send me something Friday night and I don't respond until Monday sometimes and they're offended, they are outraged that I took so long and it got me thinking about it with my email server that I use, I can set up something that basically says I'll be late for a couple of days like an auto respond or somebody sends me an email and I haven't used it in a couple of years. But it will be nice if there was a way that you can set it to send it during certain times of day. You could send back an auto response that said hey I'm not going to be responding to this because I only respond to emails and send them out during certain times of day so don't expect anything from me over the weekend or between 5 PM and 9 AM the next day.
M.S.: I think that would be the healthiest. It's just like office hours, when you phone up your dentist and they say our office is open from 9 to 5:30 PM if you're calling outside of these hours. I think this is exactly what we need for all of our professional lives. I think we need to take back our personal lives. Now there's a catch, even our personal lives are horrendously inundated. I had a situation just the other day myself and I wasn't next to my phone, I saw text and I wanted to respond because it was just the right thing to do but then I looked at my watch and I was like, no I'm not going to, I'm going to respond tomorrow morning because I don't want to wake this person up. Again eight years ago, I would have responded because we all turned our phones off at night and one of the really cool things about texting versus phoning is because if you phone, the phone would ring and somebody would pick up and you'd wake them but you could send a text at midnight and the phone would be off. You can't do that now because most of us keep our phones on at night. So same thing is always being on always being on call and a portion of this is also "our fault". Why do we leave our cell phones on, if we still have a landline, mind you. Why is it on all the time? We're really going to have to negotiate the rules of when we do and don't call and what this implies, obviously if we go to it, a cell only world we don't want to turn your phone off at night because what you do need it for emergency, it's a positive blessing of modern technology.
Rob: It's not just phones, texting too. I have a Do not Disturb function on I put on when I go to sleep and I sometimes remember to put it back on when I wake up. So I just decided that I need to do that the least and I'm very conscious of not sending texts to people after bedtime because you never know whether they have their chimes and their noises on. It seems like there ought to be and there probably is somewhere a Dear Abby, you could be the Dear Abby for technology actually.
M.S.: Perfect! Hire me! I'm on, but again some of these things are generation specific. One of the major issues with high school students and what they claim is insomnia but it's actually chronic fatigue in class and they have their phones under their pillows and they're responding and texting all night. So I wouldn't dream of that type of behavior but that's my age classification but in terms of what kids have to do to remain popular, if you're not in that loop and you go to school the next day and you don't know the things that have happened over the evening but again here I put responsibility on parents. Just the way we're talking about we should have Do not Respond after certain hours of business. I strongly believe parents should take cell phones away from children after certain hour because you know they're going to do it. Socially this is what their peer group expects them to do.
Rob: I just was talking to a friend who's throwing a party. She's having a box at the door for people to put their phones in, no phones in the party.
M.S.: Perfect and I'd love to hear that, again I had a parent here brought a child in, the child went to a birthday party and she's very strict, she does not want her daughter to have a phone and she said her daughter went to that birthday party and everybody had a phone. She said she didn't know what to do, everybody nobody at the party was talking to each other, including a lot of the moms, and the child went out and played by herself in the backyard.
Rob: Yes, I was accused recently of constantly being attached to my phone and looking at it and I thought to myself, that's what the people in their 20s and 30s do.
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