Since the early days of smartphones -- I had a Treo 600 back around 2005 -- I have been on call in some way. I have long administered servers, starting with an FTP server to share stuff with friends back in the 2000-2001 school year freshman year of college. That one was my old Acer Aspire Pentium 100 under my dorm bed. This peaked while running a clinical trial and my small wireless ISP Black Mesa Wireless from 2014-2021.

It is hard to communicate the level of stress that this on-call situation can create, especially when you don't have many people to share the load with. Often even if there were other people, I bore ultimate responsibility.

In addition to the critical stuff, there was a never-ending flood of minutia, death by 1000 cuts, everything from recall work notices from my vehicles to emails from the kids' schools full of 99% garbage and 1% things I really needed to be aware of.

All that has changed now because of two things:

1. I started using locally-running AI to filter and eventually triage first my email, then most of my incoming notifications and
2. I got an Apple Watch with LTE service, which has allowed me to still be reachable but minimally so.

I set up the locally-running AI agent so that if anything urgent/important comes in, it will first try to alert me by a message to the watch, and then, if it's urgent/important enough, it will call me and let me know about the situation. In this way I know I can leave my phone at home, or when at home just leave it on the charger, and go about the rest of my day. This prevents me from checking my email regularly, and I have email notifications off entirely. My inboxes are always at inbox zero. Tasks I need to do appear automatically in my GTD software, sorted to the correct project, with due dates added and priority automatically set.

While the AI agent still needs refinement, and I am working on that daily, the key pieces are working. Not only is my prior monitoring/notification situation less bothersome, I have actually substantially increased my automated monitoring (systems, logs, etc) to the point where pretty much everything I run is logging to a central log receiver, and a first-pass AI evaluation is done on all log items. Then, first-pass-filtered and deduplicated alerts are passed to my more general AI agent, which (as with other things) puts appropriate to-dos on my list and alerts me directly if anything truly urgent/important is going on.

This is the kind of thing we were promised for decades that computers would do for us. Instead, we have been bent to the will of the system and to the limitations imposed by poor software design and development. It has been extremely unhealthy for me, and I think for most people, even if the things driving their always-on situation have been different from mine.

It is hard to describe the level of peace I have felt from this change, it is a significant, durable change. It has been about two months now of perpetual inbox zero, and one month with the apple watch. I am trying now to use this greater peace and greater sense of mental space and clarity to bring other areas of my life under better regulation. It is a long road of recovery from the most intense periods I have put myself through, but it is good to be on that road.