Disconnect

Sometimes, you don’t want to be disturbed. You don’t want to take phone calls or IMs, you just want to get your head down and turn out some actual work instead of spending hours explaining or discussing that work with clients or co-workers or whoever it is you have to communicate with about a particular project. You also don’t want to have to chat to friends or sort out your social schedule for the next week.

You want to disconnect from all that.

A friend of mine, with two huge writing projects to complete in his final year of University, used to physically unplug his network cable in order to get stuff written. He’s not alone in seeking this kind of drastic solution to all the interference: Khoi Vinh’s Blockwriter concept and Hog Bay’s WriteRoom place this need at the centre of their design.

To recap: we disconnect from (or shut out) the multifarious distractions of the internet, like our RSS feeds and the BBC News site; we set our IM client to ‘Appear Offline’; and we concentrate.

Then the phone rings.

Now, a landline you can simply unplug (although this isn’t always a great idea), but this still leaves the mobile. If yours is anything like mine, it takes a small age to turn on again if you turn it off. This is irritating if, once you’ve done whatever it was you were doing, you want to get back to the business of communicating. I find I can only do one thing at a time, so either I’m coding or I’m talking, and if I’m talking I shouldn’t be wasting time pretending to code.

Anyway, my basic point is this: phones need an ‘offline’ mode, where incoming calls go to voicemail and text messages don’t cause an alert to be displayed until you change the phone’s mode back to normal. We have all these little ‘profiles’: General, Silent, Loud etc. Why not ‘Disconnect’? Why not let us unplug from our network of contacts, without losing all the functionality that our phones have? If I unplug my landline, I can still open my Filofax and look up someone’s address or phone number. A mobile shouldn’t be any different, despite combining the two functions.