105 hours: No smartphone and emergencies

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

I decided not to have a smartphone in order to better allocate my time.

But what if there's an emergency?

The emergency question

The emergency question is the fourth stage of reaction after the stages of surprise, admiration, and resignation I hear when I tell somebody I don't have a phone.

It goes like this:

"Wow? Really? No phone?"
"That's amazing!"
"Yeah, I could never do that.."
"But what if there's an emergency?"

I don't know how many emergencies these people run into, but back when I had a phone, I bet 99% of my time was spent on Reddit and not emergencies.

I usually reply with some version of "If I ever need help, I can just use somebody else's phone! Everybody's got one after all!" which is received with a nervous laugh and a change of subject.

So let me finally answer the question, "Given I don't have a phone, what if there's an emergency?"

Can we really just use other people's phones?

One day, it finally happened: An emergency, and I didn't have a phone.

My wife and I went to a Metallica concert: 70,000 people trying to get inside a soccer stadium in three hours. A sea of people took the streets, and there was nowhere to park.

"Dui, get out of the car and ask these people if there is any parking," she said, and so I did. While I was walking amidst the people, my wife drove away due to a bus pressuring her to move, just as the police closed the street because of the crowd forming. She couldn't come back.

We were lost from each other amidst the chaos of 70,000 other people, and I didn't have a phone.

So I walked up to this woman in her 30s who was waiting for a ride and told her my barely believable story: I didn't have a phone, and my wife drove away. No, no, nobody stole it; I just don't have one. Can I use yours? – Sure, she says suspiciously.

I called my wife, but she didn't pick up because her phone was set to not ring for unknown numbers! I didn't see that coming! Eventually, the woman's ride arrived, and I returned her phone. No luck.

I stopped another guy, a long-haired metalhead with a Black Sabbath shirt, obviously going to the concert. I told him my story, borrowed his phone and, this time, called my wife on Whatsapp. We laughed; I made a new friend and hung out with him until my wife arrived after having found parking. We later sent him a Metallica shirt as a thank-you.

Using someone else's phone in an emergency really did work!

Two types of emergencies

I may have yet to answer your question, though.

When we say we need our phones in case of emergencies, we mean one of two types of emergencies:

Emergency Subject: The one where we are the subject of the emergency and need a phone to get help, such as me getting lost in the concert.

Emergency Responder: The one where we are the helper for the emergency and need to be available when one asks for help.

Most people I talk to are concerned with the emergency responder situation: what if work calls, school calls, spouse calls, kids call, parents call, anybody calls, and I don't respond? I'm not helping!

We are more concerned about not being available for others than about our own emergencies.

It's a reasonable point, so let's explore that next.

Emergency FOMO – but what if someone calls?

The need to respond to emergencies if someone calls will vary by your personal and professional responsibilities.

If you're a doctor and it's your turn on the on-call rotation, you need a phone that your hospital can call if you need to come in.

If you work at a tech company and you're on-call, you need some way to be paged when your service goes down.

If you're a parent and your kids' school asks for your number to call in case something happens, you need a phone on which they can reach you.

In the medical and tech industry, this is called being on-call.

In short, if there's a need for an on-call schedule, and it's your turn on the on-call rotation, yes, there needs to be a way to call you.

Importantly though: for 99% of on-call situations, you don't need the internet or a smartphone – just a telephone.

When we first made the ability to reach somebody on-call prevalent, we did it through pagers in the 80s.

But today, if we're on-call, we have several alternatives to carrying a smartphone loaded with Instagram and TikTok.

Here are some options:

Landlines: One of my friends says, "The only people that call my phone are my grandparents and you, Dui." Landlines cover the most common type of emergency people care about – being called in the middle of the night in case something grave happens to a loved one.

Dumb phones: If landlines get too many unsolicited calls, or you move around a lot, you can set up a dumb phone with a list of who can call it and take it with you if needed.

Stripped-down phones: You can get a smartphone that's not very smart: technically, the only apps we need for emergencies are Phone and maybe Messages. You can disable Safari and Chrome, delete all the other apps, and still respond to emergencies.

Work phones: If you're on-call for work, you can have a separate work phone that only has work apps and allows you to respond to work emergencies.

Google Home / Amazon Echo: If you just need to be reachable by family members when you're home, these devices will let them call you.

I do a mix of the above:

• If I'm working in a role with on-call rotation, I set up a work phone and turn it on when I'm on-call so I can be paged.
• My family can call me on Google Home in an emergency.

But honestly, nobody does. Nobody calls.

But why not?

The fact is that when there's a lot of friction in reaching us, something very interesting happens, or rather, doesn't happen:

The emergencies themselves.

Is this really an emergency?

Most of us are calibrated to a life of extreme and frictionless connection: Extreme because everything that happens can potentially reach us, frictionless because it's very easy for anything to reach us.

So it's natural to think that all the things that reach us now would create a barrage of bad outcomes if they couldn't make their way to us: bad decisions, emergencies unhandled, people angry at our lack of availability who desperately need our help! Now!

But importantly, this extreme and frictionless connection dictates the triviality of what reaches us.

When we think of being reachable for emergencies, we think of a loved one getting in a car crash at 2 a.m., the hospital calling to give the terrible news, the 30-minute window to drive to the hospital and say our last goodbyes before they're lost forever.

Instead, we get a call from our parents at 2 p.m. to talk about how they need to go to the grocery store because they ran out of milk.

In the book A World Without Email, Cal Newport explores a similar example of ending triviality by increasing friction, in this case, by turning off email experimentally for five days.

In the book section titled "Email Creates More Work," he reports:

[..] one of the subjects was a research scientist who needed to spend around two hours each day setting up a laboratory for an experiment. He reported that he was frequently frustrated because his boss had the habit of sending him emails during this preparation period, asking him questions or delegating work. This required the scientist to stop what he was doing to attend to his boss’s wishes — significantly slowing down the lab setup. The reason Mark remembers this scientist’s plight was because during the five days when he was without email, his boss stopped bothering him during his lab setup. What makes this observation remarkable is that the boss’s office was only two doors down the hall. The small amount of extra difficulty required to walk a few steps and poke his head through the door was enough to prevent the boss from handing off extra work to the scientist. “He was thrilled,” Mark remembers.

Newport, Cal. A World Without Email (pp. 55-56). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

While Cal Newport goes on to make the case that the extreme ease of sending emails creates more work and hence overload, the same is happening to our extreme availability for emergencies: the less friction there is to reach us, the more trivial the things that do.

The level of triviality of what people want to bring to our attention is out of our control. But we can control the friction they must go through to do it.

If we need to be reached in an emergency, we don't need smartphones' extreme and frictionless connection. In fact, that can be counterproductive and get in the way of telling trivial events from real emergencies.

Instead, it's in our control to increase friction so that significant events get to us.

And nothing else.