Turn It Off | Take the Turn It Off Quiz

Here's a short and entertaining quiz to help you determine exactly how much today's technologies have taken over your life:

Uncurl your hand from your mouse, put down your cell phone, unhook your pager from your waistband, calmly back away from your fax machine, and take this quiz (inspired by several "tests" seen on the Internet):

Answer "True" or "False":

1. You can no longer sit through an entire movie without having at least one device on your body ring, beep or buzz:
TRUE FALSE

2. You think of the gadgets in your office or briefcase as "friends," but you forgot to send your father a birthday card:
TRUE FALSE

3. You snicker at friends and co-workers with modems no faster than 28.8 kbps:
TRUE FALSE

4. You can't understand why some of your co-workers don't take their laptops with them on every business trip - even if it's only for a few hours across town:
TRUE FALSE

5. On vacation, you are reading a manual about new trends in wireless communications and you're turning the pages faster than everyone else who is reading John Grisham novels:
TRUE FALSE

6. You know the e-mail addresses of your twenty closest co-workers or customers from memory, but you have to look up your own Social Security number:
TRUE FALSE

7. The announcement you can't wait to hear on an airplane is "It is now permissible to use approved electronic devices" - and you can find and hit the power switch on your laptop before the announcement is over:
TRUE FALSE

8. You have not gone more than 24 consecutive hours without checking your voice mail, even when you've been sick enough to hallucinate:
TRUE FALSE

9. Within the last three days, you have told a loved one "Just let me finish sending these e-mails" after 9 p.m. or on a weekend:
TRUE FALSE

10. When you watch "NYPD Blue" and see one of the detectives get paged while in bed during an intimate moment, you can't understand why his/her significant other gets upset when the detective actually answers the page:
TRUE FALSE

If you answered "True" to five or more questions, you're going to find this book very valuable. You hold in your hands the solution to a critical problem that plagues many of today's technology-laden workers - including, perhaps, you. The problem is simple: the good news about today's mobile-office technology is that you can work just about anytime and anywhere, and the bad news is also that you can - and probably do - work just about anytime and anywhere. In extreme cases, people today find themselves working all the time and everywhere.

Smash All The Laptops? No Way!

While you might have the urge at times to toss your pager into the river, or "accidentally" pour a can of soda on the keyboard of your laptop, you can't make those tools - and the work you do with them - go away that easily.

This book isn't intended to stir up a revolution against today's portable technology. Instead, it's meant to help you use and deal with that technology more effectively in three ways:

1. UNDERSTAND the role that mobile-office tools and technology play in your life, and determine whether they might be hurting as much as helping;

2. DECIDE how and where you want to begin drawing the line between the part of your life that you're willing to devote to anytime/anywhere work, and the rest of your life that you'd rather reserve for yourself;

3. DEVELOP a customized plan for regaining control of your use of these tools, and then discussing your plan and its implications with your clients, manager, and co-workers - in a way that will gain their cooperation.

I can't promise that you'll go from a 60- or 70-hour work week down to a 40-hour week; after all, that might have gone the way of the rotary telephone. For the reasons I explained in the Introduction, we seem to be committed to a world of work in which "do more with less - and do it faster" is the guiding principle. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that the nonstop work made possible by today's technology is really good over the long term for you or your customers and clients or your employer.

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