On January 1, 2008, my wife Jenny and I quietly canceled our cell phone service. We knew we would get a lot of flak from our friends and family if we announced our decision in advance, so we didn’t say anything to anyone about what our intentions were.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, we counted down the final 10 seconds of 2007. As the new year dawned, we gave each other a big kiss, then shut off our cell phones, walked over to the wastebasket under our kitchen sink, and said goodbye to our cell phones forever.

For the previous seven years of our lives, we had considered our cell phones an indispensable part of our lives. But with the passage of time, we’d grown disenchanted with them, because it seemed they were controlling our lives in many ways. Between the two of us, we were getting an average of 200 phone calls a month. Most seemed to come at inopportune times — often early in the morning, late in the day, at mealtimes, or when we were driving. Most of our calls were arriving at times when we really wished we weren’t being interrupted. Our lives were very busy, and we felt very over-committed time-wise.

As we discussed different things we could do to create extra margin in our lives, we both kept questioning the benefits of our cell phones. We questioned whether the benefit gained was worth the inconvenience endured. After some discussion, we agreed to make what we both considered a scary and radical decision: We decided to eliminate our cell phones as we started the new year on January 1st.

For us, the decision has turned out to be a really smart choice. Sure, there have been times along the way where each of us would have killed to have had access to the convenience of a cell phone, but those times have been few and far between. In fact, both of us have been surprised at how little “need” for cell phones we actually DID have. Then there was this curious, unexpected phenomenon that occurred: Remember those 200 phone calls a month that we were getting? Well… they just went away. It was like they evaporated. It was months before even one single person asked us what happened to our cell phones! No one complained or felt ignored. Those 200 phone calls per month just seemed to vanish into thin air like they never even happened.

At the time, our decision to eliminate cell phones from our lives seemed like heresy in some ways. But truthfully, we haven’t noticed any difference in the quality of our relationships with our customers, friends, or family since we decided to go cell phone free. For Jenny and I, the resultant time savings and extra harmony in our lives have been a blessing.

Cell Phone Freedom Day has turned out to be a very good decision for us. We save about a hundred dollars a month. We have 200 less interruptions. And we have a little extra margin in our lives that didn’t exist prior to January 1, 2008.

If you would like to contact me, my personal email address is MikeStevens@Gutenblog.com