The evolution of my insurance business as every business has been a crazy ride for the last 5 decades. We are so connected now 24/7 that it is really scary. I am just not sure how this happened to me but it did. I am a child of the 60s and 70s, when technology was a video game from my hometown Magnavox plant called “Odyssey” which consisted of “pong” (ping pong) “tennis” (same game with bigger paddles) and “breakout” which was vertical “pong” knocking out blocks. We would play this for about an hour then we played outside the rest of the day. Today my kids would lose their minds with this primitive technology.  Now we are so dependent on technology and media, we can’t live without it. Let alone run a business without it. You want me to go unplugged, you must be crazy!

When I started in the business world after college in the 80s technology was coming of age. My first job as an account manager in the beer distribution business, I was introduced to two way radios and shortly after the pager. Now we were to wear our pager 24/7 and be accessible 24/7 in case of a “beer emergency”. This means a bar runs out of a particular brand of beer at 2:30am when they closed at 3:00am. I would be paged with a phone number and then call stated number to I had no idea who would answer nor who was paging me. In other words, there was nowhere to hide.  The cell phone was introduced during the 80s. It was either a car phone or a portable cell the size of a shoe box. Only rich people had them because to talk on them was about $3 per minute. And get this kids, you could only talk on a cell phone, “gasp” no texting or email existed. The best way to communicate with people in the 80s was to get in a car and go meet them face to face. Can you just imagine?

If you had to send a document, you had to put it in an envelope, stamp it and mail it. This is so primitive today we refer to it as “snail mail”. Then along came the facsimile machine or fax. This was pure magic. To stick a piece of paper in an overgrown telephone and make it come out anywhere in the world was pure voodoo. Problem was if you were still in your car driving from that face to face appointment, you had to go to the office to pick up the fax. The other fun thing about receiving a fax was the thermal paper roll it came on and you destroyed it trying to get the stupid paper to tear. Ugh.

Now we fast forward to today. We now communicate in ways never conceived. We have cell phones now called smart phones that talk (rarely), text, email, tweet, Facebook, LinkedIn message, instant message, instagram, post, blog, webinar, news, sports scores, stock market reports, weather, photograph and video. Everything is instant. I’ll admit I am addicted; I can’t go unplugged for a day, let alone a week. Even when my wife and I go out for date night, we are constantly texting or emailing while waiting on our food. It is crazy how we are so plugged in.  I still don’t know how this happened.

I am trying to become less dependent and go unplugged for at least a short time period. Here are a couple of tips that help. When I am in a face to face meeting, I turn off my phone and stick it in my pocket. If I leave it out I am tempted to look at when it goes off. A friend of mine taught me another good trick when having team meetings. We do a phone pile, meaning everyone stacks their phone in the middle of the table face down on top of one another. That way no one knows whose phone is vibrating. The phones are not touched until break time or the end of the meeting. This actually works. If you have any tips on how to effectively go unplugged, please share. Admitting you have a problem is the first step in recovery.

“The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug”.—Pico Iyer

Image courtesy of pakorn at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Tim Wilhoit is owner/principal of Your Friend 4 Life Insurance Agency in Nashville, TN. He is a family man, father of 3, entrepreneur, insurance agent, life insurance broker, salesman, sales trainer, recruiter, public speaker, blogger and team leader with over 26 years of experience in sales and marketing in the insurance and beverage industries.