Sick and tired of "always on" tech

[mr_spock]

Given than my career has been in IT, mostly in networking, cloud, web apps and so on, this may seem odd.

I am totally sick of being always available by umpteen means. I'm working at home, so it's hard to escape anyway, but I get:

• Customer texts
• Customer whatsapp (since they find me by phone number, and from many countries this is the best way to call too)
• Colleague IM on Google Hangouts
• Emails obviously
• Phone calls, usually telesales but can be real business calls.
• Personal whatsapp, texts, FB messenger
• Skype messages, calls

Time zone seems to be meaningless to customers in Australia, Israel, Korea, Europe. Even my colleagues in Spain don't get the idea that I don't want calls at 8am. If I dump them to voicemail they call again. At least the Americans get it, I suppose they're more used to working across time zones.

It all arrives on my laptop (same one for work and personal), iPhone (same), watch...

I want ONE button that says I'm not available to work. This doesn't seem to exist. Maybe there's a business opportunity. However, that would prevent being contacted if we had a real customer outage or a colleague had a personal emergency.

Whinge over.

[mr_spock]

Thanks for both serious and funny responses!

To answer some points:

It's more about people respecting the local time and the sheer number of contact methods. I run a software company, and if one of my big customers has an outage that's maybe 30,000 users or more affected. I'm OK if they call me (or better, one of my support team gives me a heads up first). I also really don't want two of every device. Of course I have two Google logins etc., but I use the same tools for work and fun, don't want to maintain it all twice.

Not so long ago, Skype was the only non-phone tool. Very easy to set DND and anything urgent would be a phone call. That was just fine. Now I'd have to set up groups for work/non-work in Skype, Hangouts (can you even do that? I know I can't set an OOH schedule), FB, WhatsApp, set up divert to VM schedules in our cloud phone system (and change it every time I travel to another time zone), yadda yadda...

Actually, I've realised what really gets me. It's the pinging/bleeping/buzzing and the lack of ability for some people to type a sentence. The out of hours stuff is irritating but is limited. However: this one for example with my 20-something marketing person.

Her: Are you free?
Me: No, just about to get on a call for an hour or so. I'll let you know when I'm done.
Her: OK
Her: Sorry
Her: It can wait
Her: It was just about our Google Ads
Her: Do you think we should add some keywords?
Her: Talk later
Her: since you're busy
Her: Thanks
Her: I'll send you an email

Every one resulted in "ping" and a desktop alert.

Off to google to see if there's a generalised way to deal with this. The off button solution doesn't work for me, and I think needing 2 devices is nuts. It offends my geek-ness!

[mr_spock]

I also don't have home automation. I don't see the point for me. Maybe there's a way with IFTTT to grab all the notifications in the evening and send me a summary email in the morning... Hangouts can snooze notifications, but not on a schedule.

[mr_spock]

Helpfully, PH doesn’t make my phone/watch/laptop ping. We’re a fairly small company, most of the staff are in another country so staff meetings are rare. All the developers are fine. The silly text conversation was to illustrate that certain people don’t know how to respect others’ time, I have spoken to her about this but it seems to be a common culture to write many short messages. It happened in the day - the occasional night messages tend to be from Australia or the Middle East when it’s their daytime.

Anyway, I can mute notifications but my issue is that I can’t do it in one place for one address book.

Anyway, off to bed with all tech off as I’m on a promise