You can't build a life around a phone that's allowed to interrupt it.
I once replied to a customer email from a bathroom stall at my mom's seventieth birthday party and felt proud of myself for it.
Six minutes. That was my average response time across all channels for about four years. I tracked it. I bragged about it. I built a whole identity around the fact that nobody who paid me money ever waited.
Here's the trap. I confused being available with being good. And I trained an entire customer base to expect a human inside their phone, then resented them for expecting exactly what I'd promised.
You don't notice it happening. The first time you reply to a client at 11pm it feels like care. The second time it feels like service. By the four hundredth time it's just what you do, and now your nervous system is wired to the little red badge on your phone the way a slot machine player is wired to the lever.
I'd be at dinner with a woman I actually liked and feel my leg vibrate and my whole body would lean toward the table where the phone was face-down. She'd be mid-sentence. I'd be calculating whether four minutes was too long to wait before checking. I told myself I was being respectful by not pulling it out. I wasn't. I was just timing the dopamine.
The worst part is the math seemed to work. Fast replies meant good reviews. Good reviews meant more customers. More customers meant more replies. More replies meant a faster average. A faster average meant I had to keep the streak going because that was now the product. Not the thing I actually sold. The speed.
I remember sitting in a parking lot in Long Beach at 1am answering a question about a shipment that wasn't going out until Thursday. The customer didn't need an answer at 1am. He hadn't asked for one. He'd sent the email at 1am because that's when it occurred to him, the way people send emails. The expectation that I would answer at 1am was something I had built, brick by brick, every time I'd answered an email at 1am.
Nobody made me do it. That's the part that's hard to sit with.
When I sold the company, the buyer asked me what the response time SLA was and I told him six minutes. He laughed. He thought I was joking. When he realized I wasn't, he looked at me the way you look at a guy who's been doing his own dental work for a decade and is bragging about it.
He moved the SLA to 24 hours in week one. Revenue didn't move. Reviews didn't move. The only thing that moved was that the person sitting in my old chair got to have dinner.
That broke something in me. Not in a clean way. In the way where you realize you spent ten years guarding a door nobody was trying to walk through.
The thing I built now has a single rule. I check messages twice a day. Once after coffee. Once before I close the laptop. If something is on fire, it can be on fire for six more hours, and in four years exactly zero things have actually been on fire. The world keeps moving. Customers wait. Most of them don't even notice. The ones who do, leave, and the ones who replace them never knew me as the guy who answered at 1am, so they don't expect it.
I lost a couple of customers in the transition. I want to be honest about that. There were people who'd grown attached to the version of me that lived in their pocket and they didn't like the new arrangement. I let them go. It cost me maybe eight grand the first year. It bought me my evenings back, every single one of them, forever.
The surfers I watch in Bali do this thing where they sit out past the break for forty minutes without moving. They're not lazy. They're not missing waves. They're waiting for the one that's worth standing up for. Tourists paddle for everything and end up exhausted in the whitewash by noon. The locals catch three waves and go home happy.
I spent a decade paddling for every email.
If your phone is allowed to interrupt your life, your life will be shaped by your phone. Not your work. Not your customers. The phone. That's the whole trick and I missed it for ten years.
The fastest response I ever gave was six minutes. The most expensive one too.
— Best, Jose
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