Memorize Phone Numbers in Case of Emergency
The convenience your smartphone offers may be putting you at risk. Get-It-Done Guy explains why memorizing the phone numbers of important people in your life may actually save your life one day.
We all love our smartphones. They’ve revolutionized contact-tracking. With the push of a button, we can call our colleagues, significant others, order-out pizza, and pretty much reach everyone who’s ever called us. It’s so easy that we don’t even bother to memorize phone numbers anymore. Why should we? The phone keeps track of that for us, along with email addresses, street addresses, Facebook profiles, contact notes, and just about anything else we’d ever want to know.
But there is a sinister downside: When we outsource our dialing to our phones, the quiet side-effect is that we no longer remember people’s numbers. And this is a very bad thing.
The fact is that disasters happen. Electrical outages happen. Zombie invasions happen. If you don’t know the numbers of your loved ones and the people who might be able to offer you help, then your disaster recovery plan is pretty simple: Howl in despair.
Prepare for the worst by memorizing 5-10 of your key contacts. Choose people who can (and would be willing to) save you in a pinch. Saving cell phone numbers in your phone’s contacts is a great way to keep all your connections in one place. But in times of emergency, or even if you simply don’t have your phone, an electronically saved contact list can’t help you.
Make a list of people you want to be able to call in an emergency, or people nearby who you can reach if you don’t have your phone: your roommate, your parents, your cousin Ashley, whoever.
Then memorize those numbers by typing them into your phone several times. Heck, you can even call them for reals. Just to say “Hi.” They’ll feel loved by the attention. You needn’t tell them that you’re just practicing their number in case you ever need them to come to your rescue.
Then, every time you want to call cousin Ashley, search through your contacts or favorites list, but just look at the number. Look at it, then type it in manually. If someone’s watching, tell them you’re just trying to imagine what it was like to live back in the 20th century. Before you know it, you’ll have the numbers memorized, and when the zombie apocalypse comes, you’ll be suitably prepared.
Woman talking on phone image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
