The filthy habit I indulge in that’s worse than smoking

Halfway through a dinner party celebrating New Year’s Eve, I felt a buzz in my pocket. It was my phone and someone had sent me an email. I should have left it switched off, but like a lot of people I’ve become hopelessly addicted to carrying it around, even on holiday in Miami, which is where I am now.

“I’ll just leave it on vibrate mode,” I say to myself, as if that will make it less intrusive. The only result of that silly evasion is that it buzzes, insistently, in my pocket, giving me a distracted air which my dining companions find both unattractive and baffling. It would be a lot more honest and, indeed, rude to just put the thing on the table and check it incessantly.

But New Year’s Eve is a time for dinner and conversation and a certain amount of reflection, not a time for answering business-related emails, so I felt like I was on safe ground. I was keeping the phone in my pocket, I reasoned, just in case family or friends wanted to wish me the best for 2014.

There is no scientific evidence for what I’m about to claim, but I’m about to do so anyway: when the phone buzzed in my pocket, I knew it was from one of my producing partners on my new television series, asking about the script I’m supposed to be writing.

I’m sure you’re thinking all alerts are the same. And while this is true, for some reason I can detect a certain stress-inducing buzziness to this particular vibration. In the middle of a pretty party, I felt the dread of the unread work-related email festering in my pocket.

Reading it at the table was unthinkable. So I excused myself to the outdoor patio, around the corner, past the smokers, and found an out-of-view nook to indulge my filthy habit.

I wasn’t alone. About half a dozen other guys – and they were all guys; women, I guess, are able to resist the call of the email alert – were also furiously working their phones.

The email was, in verbatim, this: “Just checking in on script #2 and wondering when we’ll see a draft. Obviously need it as soon as possible. Happy New Year.”

What kind of person, I said to my friends at the table after I returned from my furtive check, sends that kind of email on New Year’s Eve?

If you’re not a fireman or a policeman or a waiter, I fumed to my friends, it’s a fair bet that you’re not working on New Year’s Eve.

“When is the script due?” one of my friends asked.

“Two weeks ago,” I said.

Which struck them all as significant, I suppose, since they each exchanged meaningful – and, to me, highly annoying – smirks.

Did I not wonder, one of them asked, what makes a person who is chronically behind schedule with work and deeply averse to deadlines carry his phone around to receive each reminding and demanding email the moment it arrives?

I do not wonder, I told them.

Could it not be guilt? Could it possibly be that instead of meeting deadlines and being on time, I use the phone as a kind of displacing bustle – all emails and messages are distracting transactions – to create the illusion of work when in fact no work is being done?

I had forgotten that one of my best friends in Miami is a prominent psychiatrist. The dinner was quickly turning ugly.

Since New Year’s Eve is traditionally a time to make goals and resolutions for the next year, how about if I resolve to manage my time better, to be prompt for appointments and events? That, more than any other course of action, would reduce the stress in my life and make leaving my phone off a real possibility. When you’re even-steven with the world, my friends told me, you don’t need to carrying around a nagging machine in your pocket.

“How much do I owe you for this therapy session?” I asked my psychiatrist friend. But the point was made. They were right. I spend more time – and endure more stress – avoiding, delaying and being late with projects than I do just sitting down to do them.

Maybe, I thought to myself, 2014 is the year I stop doing that. I made a silent resolution: 2014 will be an on-time year for me.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and was about to shut it off when I noticed a few more texts and emails had come in.

I quickly scrolled through them – just checking to see if anything important had been sent, on New Year’s Eve – and then looked up to my friends to announce my 2014 goal to never be late again.

But they were already wishing each other a Happy New Year. I had missed the countdown. The year is starting off in a troubling way.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl