, Jean-Louis Servan-Schriber (gee, do you think he's French?) tells the story of Lucien Guitry (another Frenchman, an actor this time) who reacted to that brand-new invention, the telephone, with the words: "Someone rings you, and like a servant you respond?"Indeed.
Today, we tend to see our telephones (land, cell, smart, and other) as our servants. As tools we use, rather than masters we serve.
But Guitry's perspective seems just as accurate, if not more so. We all know people who seem at the phone's beck and call more or less constantly, even when the call doesn't seem very urgent or very important. (We may even be those "people" ourselves. But I won't tell if you won't.)
Ongoing multi-device accessibility is one of the many forms of clutter we mostly take for granted.
You don't need to change that if you're comfortable wherever you are. But it's worth asking: what would your creative life be like if you took three hours a day...one day a week...one weekend a month and made it entirely phone free except in cases of truly dire emergency? Free from outgoing calls, that is, as well as incoming ones? What would the silence of that telephone hiatus do, once the initial anxiety was over?
If you already have some practice like this, with your phone or other communications devices, I'd love to know how, when, how often and what it does for you. So comments to this or any other post are, as always, welcome. (Especially, of course, because they don't require answering a phone.)
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