Eric Holen

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about my frustration with my Motorola Q9c smartphone. I have had my phone for over a year and thoroughly enjoy using it for accessing email, the Internet and of course handling telephone calls.

Over the last several weeks, I noticed that my phone was locking up more often. Sometimes the problems even delayed me from placing a telephone call because I was locked out. After much research (e.g. Google) and thought, I finally hit upon the cause. I had overloaded my phone.

Note: At this point, start inserting “life” for phone and keep reading.

I had loaded up my phone with every possible application, tool and toy that I get my hands own. My phone was stressed. I was trying to make it do too much and I wasn’t listening to it complain to me until its problems finally frustrated me into action.

So a little over a week ago, I sat down and took stock of my phone. I made a list of the applications that were most important to me. Out of the 53 applications that I had installed, I only regularly used 6 of them. So, after some self convinceing, I performed a master reset to restore my phone back to its original, fresh out of the box state. Even after installing the six applications that I needed, my phone was back to its perky self. No more lockups or frustration.

Now, performing a master reset on a phone is one thing. But this process brought me a minor revelation. How many of us load our lives down until we get to the point that we stress ourselves to the point that we lock ourselves out? Sometimes we don’t even notice it because we are trying to do so much for others that we do not take care of ourselves. Those are the times that we need to take stock of our lives. What’s do I truly need? What’s important? If we, including me, can be honest, we might find that we could do with a lot less, and performing our own “master reset” to clean out our lives would lead to less frustration and lockups.