Host Sharon DeKoning sits down with Robin Ross, owner of Sabre Communications Inc. in Lloydminster. With decades of experience in communication technology, Robin shares insights into the evolution of phones—from the Motorola brick to today's smartphones—and how we can use them as productivity tools instead of distractions. She discusses practical strategies for managing notifications, organizing apps into folders, and leveraging automation features like scheduled texts and Siri reminders to streamline daily tasks.

Robin also highlights an eye-opening Deloitte statistic: the average person picks up their phone 96 times a day. To counteract excessive screen time, she emphasizes the importance of mindful phone use, setting limits on social media, and using focus modes to allow only essential notifications. She also shares practical tips for organization and customizing phone settings to improve efficiency. Whether for business, farming, or daily life, Robin’s advice helps listeners turn their phones into valuable tools for productivity and meaningful connections. Tune in to hear Robin’s expert advice on making your phone work for you, not against you!

Robin Ross is the owner of Sabre Communications Inc. in Lloydminster, where she brings decades of experience in communication technology. Beyond her expertise in the industry, Robin is a multifaceted professional—balancing life as a farmer alongside her husband, expressing her creativity through painting, and empowering others as a professional coach. With a deep understanding of how technology shapes our daily lives, she is passionate about helping people use their phones as a tool for productivity rather than a distraction.

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Transcript
Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:16] Welcome back to the It's Time for Success: The Business Insights podcast. Today's podcast is on all of our lifelines, our phones. And we are going to be discussing, when used correctly, they can help us and not be a distraction. Joining me today is Robin Ross from Sabre Communications Inc. in Lloydminster. Robin not only owns Sabre Communications, she also farms with her husband, paints and she is a professional coach. Robin has decades of experience in communication technology and is here to share how we can make our phones work for us instead of against us. Thank you, Robin, for joining us today.

Robin Ross: [00:00:52] It's great to be with you, Sharon.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:00:54] Thank you. Robin, you've got to see the phones go from a brick phone, which was literally just for a phone, up until today, which we hardly use at all for a phone. Can you tell us a little bit about the steps that you've seen along the way?

Robin Ross: [00:01:08] When I started selling phones, we were selling the Motorola Brick, which was probably about 7 or 8 inches long. It had a big antenna on it, and weighed about 2 or 3 pounds. There's a reason why they called it the brick. We also sold a lot of bag phones, permanent mounts, installed in vehicles. Guys would have it hooked up to their horns so that when their phone rang, the horn on their truck blew.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:01:36] Back then, when that first started, it wasn't an everyday use for the phone. It would be more for business? Farmers? Who would mostly use them back in those days?

Robin Ross: [00:01:47] Back then it was mostly guys that were working in the oil patch that had them. They were quite expensive so anybody who had one for just personal use considered that it was a luxury. It was sort of a status symbol, definitely not a necessity. The price of them back then and the price of the plans, I can remember people coming in, and their phone bills regularly were like $2,500.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:02:19] Oh my goodness. I can drive down Highway 17 and I can drop a call six times by the time I'm in Provost. What were they like for reception?

Robin Ross: [00:02:31] That was a different network, that was back on the old analog network. But that has always been an issue on the border because the call is handing off back and forth as you go.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:02:43] That's so funny. I always think of that movie with Mel Gibson when they're talking on the phone. Some of the old movies have those big phones, I still chuckle when I see them. One thing I want to talk with you about, and it's more for me to learn, and it's a mindset for me. I'm going to tell you a little story, the other day I had a customer come in. My office is right where I can make eye contact as soon as they come in. She looked at me, I'm on my phone, and I instantly felt terrible because I looked like I'm not giving her the proper attention or I'm just doing nothing. It's a mindset that our phones are wasting time. But in fact, I was uploading a receipt. I was actually working. It's definitely a mindset. In a business atmosphere, all my team has a phone, and I get annoyed when I see them on their phones. But yet we have WhatsApp communication between our team, which is vitally important because we have different locations. They upload pictures into our software, which is vitally important. If they're not at their desks, they can check their emails. It's a mindset that I have to change. Do you find that's something in all workforces or that's just something I have to work on?

Robin Ross: [00:03:55] No, I think that, overall, that's how people perceive that. I equate it to, when you're driving and everybody who's driving slower than you is an idiot, and everybody who's driving faster than you is a moron. If I'm using my phone, I feel it's important. But if you're using it, you're probably just wasting time.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:04:17] Which happens. I get up every morning and guess what I do? I get my cup of coffee, I crawl back into bed and I scroll.

Robin Ross: [00:04:23] I see it at the grocery store. People will be annoyed with other people who are using their phone while they're navigating the grocery store, but they're looking at their grocery list. But other people perceive them as, you're just standing here gabbing on the phone or texting or something.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:04:40] That is so true. Some people are so conscious of the labels now, so they're researching everything. It is something I find that, in our day and age, it is the new norm and people like me have to accept it. What about valuable tools like time management for your phone? As we know, it's not the phone, there's so many tools incorporated into our phones that we can use to organize our days. Can you elaborate on some of those?

Robin Ross: [00:05:11] I think it is a case of being mindful about how you're using your phone. There are some very good apps that come with your phone as far as helping you manage your time. Your calendar, reminders and notes apps are very good. I love the notes app because it's my little filing cabinet. For example, in my house, every room has different light bulbs for some reason. When I need to buy light bulbs, I can never remember which one I'm supposed to buy. I have pictures of all the packaging and what room they belong to so I use it like that all the time.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:05:49] That is so smart. I use it for my license plates because I don't remember them. When I go check into the hotel room they ask, what's your license plate number? I'll get it for you, just one moment, please.

Robin Ross: [00:06:00] It's things like that. Another thing I use it for on the farm is if we ever have an emergency, all the land locations are in there. Farmers typically call their land after whoever they bought it from or who had lived there years ago. For example, you'll have the Stevenson place. Well, if I phoned 9-1-1 and I said we've had an accident at the Stevenson place, they don't know where that is. Maybe I'm really rattled, I wouldn't know the land location off the top of my head. So that's one way that we use those.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:06:32] That's very clever. My husband, I shouldn't throw him underneath the bus but I'm going to because he's pathetic with technology, he gets a new phone and he loses everything all the time. Why is that?

Robin Ross: [00:06:48] He should be running an automatic backup into iCloud or whatever platform he's using. You can have it so it backs up every evening and that's very helpful.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:00] I did tell him. It says I don't have enough storage, it's full.

Robin Ross: [00:07:06] Yeah, you have to buy it.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:08] Fine, I'll go into his phone and see if I can figure it out. It drives me insane because he loses his contacts, he loses almost everything every time.

Robin Ross: [00:07:17] I think with Apple, it's $1.29 a month or something, it's very cheap. Some people don't like to have to pay for it, but we see people all the time where they've lost their phone in the lake or it's gone through an auger or something. It's totally trashed and we can't get the information off of it. All of a sudden, people have lost their pictures, lots of good memories, and contacts. There's been a lot of tears over stuff like that, so it's an easy way to fix it.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:47] My husband, he definitely has issues with technology, but if he came into Sabre Communications, you would help him set that up. Is that a normal thing?

Robin Ross: [00:07:58] Definitely, yes.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:07:59] That's really cool because he would need help with that kind of stuff. Another thing for phones is even doing your emails, you talked about pictures. For me as a business owner, an app that I really like is Dext. Have you heard of that one?

Robin Ross: [00:08:18] I have heard of it. I haven't used it, but I am going to look into using it.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:08:23] There is a fee for it, I can't remember what the cost is. It's one of those fees that it is what it is, like when you go get milk, you need milk. All my team, if they have a receipt they just upload it and it goes straight into Dext, and then our bookkeeper can have access to it. I'm not getting calls at the end of the month saying, where's this receipt, where is that receipt? It's a huge time saver for me as a business owner. Are there any other applications that you can think of that can save time? Dext, having that, there's less room for error.

Robin Ross: [00:08:57] Things like your banking app, that will save you time. Even a lot of the apps that come with the phone will. Now I find them being able to send text messages and schedule them to send later. I'll give you an example. My son likes to use me as his personal assistant. Last night he texted me and he said, can you remind me at 6:00 tomorrow morning that I need to get fuel for my truck, I have this job I have to have hip waders for. I was worried, what if I forget? Because I have some things to remember. So I just wrote the text message, programmed it to send it at 6:15 this morning and he got it.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:09:40] You're supermom. I'm going to check that out, I'm going to try that right now. How do I do that? I'm going to send something to Leon, that's my husband. How do I schedule it to go later?

Robin Ross: [00:09:54] You've written the text and then just beside that there's the plus sign. Hit 'send later' then you can select the time.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:10:09] Oh my goodness that is so cool, thank you for that. Because what happens is, I get up super early. This is great for business owners. My brain is on fire in the morning all the time. But I can't text my staff at that time, I can't send WhatsApp at that time. Because that's really not cool. That's very cool, thank you for that. That's a great share. Any other tips? Come on, tell me. I know one, you said that you had a ringer for your alarm clock. How did that work?

Robin Ross: [00:10:45] I'm not good at getting up in the morning. I'm not a quick start, let's call it that. I tend to snooze. I have my alarm, I break all the rules, I have my phone right by my bed, I use it as my alarm clock. I have it set up so that when my alarm goes off, Siri reads me a message that I've written to myself. I might say, it's Thursday, you have a meeting with Sharon today. So it gets me thinking, this is what I have on today, I need to get going. Then after that plays, it follows up by starting to play a podcast. Just having somebody else talking and getting me going and talking about work then I can get started.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:11:30] How hard is something like that to set up?

Robin Ross: [00:11:32] It's not difficult at all.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:11:35] If somebody wanted to look into this, they could probably find it on YouTube. How do you find out how to do that?

Robin Ross: [00:11:42] Definitely there's videos on YouTube. It's in the shortcut menu on your iPhone under 'automations'. Other things I've done is, if you're trying to restrict how much time you're on social media, you can set it up so when I open Facebook, start a timer for five minutes.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:11:59] Very clever because you can start and then all of a sudden it's 45 minutes later and you've learned nothing.

Robin Ross: [00:12:05] Right. I shouldn't say it's impossible, but social media is such a part of our life now that it's hard to not be on it at some point. But it's very easy, like you say, to get lost in it. So that's a good way to have that friendly reminder, you've been on here for 15 minutes or 5 minutes or whatever you set that for.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:12:29] You set the timer when you jump on, that's very clever. You had mentioned in your conversation just now how you have your phone beside your bed. I had taken a course, or listened to a book, or whatever it was and they said that you should never do that, you should put it elsewhere. That's fine, but I tend to disagree a little bit with that now. Because what happens if my kids need to get a hold of me in the middle of the night? Or what happens if something goes on and I need to get reached out to in the middle of the night? That's my only form of communication, I don't have a house phone. Is there a way to keep my phone, to just ring for important people instead of vibrate? How does that work? Is there a way that I can do both, have the best of both worlds?

Robin Ross: [00:13:19] You can customize it so that it won't let all communication through, but you can select who it lets through.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:13:28] Even if you're at work during the day and you're waiting for a certain call or your wife is pregnant, you could make sure that call goes through. And that's just a simple setting, is it still in the automation thing?

Robin Ross: [00:13:44] No, that's in your focus modes.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:13:46] Holy doodles, there's a lot going on there. I do know for a fact that Sabre Communications deals with Saskatchewan phones. I have an Alberta phone number so I can't get a phone from you, unfortunately. But when people buy a phone from you, can you help them with this? How does all that work?

Robin Ross: [00:14:10] I will clarify that we can port over anyone with a Lloydminster, Alberta number. But any number that's west of Lloydminster, we can't.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:14:22] That was me because mine's a Provost number. Then I'd have to change my number that I've had at the same time to a Lloyd number. So you can help basically anybody in Lloydminster?

Robin Ross: [00:14:38] We're happy to help anybody who stops by the store who is having trouble.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:14:44] I was in this store and I bought myself a phone case from there. You have lots of accessories in there as well. We talked about distractions a little bit, and how they can be a distraction. Imagine me at work. Right now I have three monitors in front of me, and a lot of people do work off of two or three monitors. I have my phone going off, I have my emails going off, I have WhatsApp going off, I have so much happening. Is there a way that you can organize your day and have less distractions? Because we do know that when you shift, it takes how many minutes? You know that better than I do, to shift up and shift down.

Robin Ross: [00:15:20] I think it's 23 minutes to get yourself refocused again. When you think back to when my career first started, we didn't even have email. You had a phone on your desk, you might have had voicemail, you had a physical inbox on your desk, and the mail came in through the door. Now when you look at how many different directions you have information coming at you from, and all these different platforms, your customers are contacting you through text, they're contacting you through the telephone, there's WhatsApp, through any social media messaging. All of those things you have to be tuned into somewhat to be responsive. My advice would be to turn off as many notifications as you can. Let's say you have some shopping app and they want to send you a notification of '15% off on widgets this week', shut that off. Because that's just one more interruption you don't need.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:16:25] You made a point one time to me and it resonated with me. Back in the day, you got the mail. That's when you checked your messages, you didn't have access. If I get a customer's email, I think I have to respond back to them right now. I don't think I need to respond back to them right now, I can actually continue working with what I'm doing and then get to it. It's another mindset and another shift. I think it's a matter of prioritizing. Even the social media and the messages, put that in your calendar to check on that at 1:00 or whatever the time is. Get your day scheduled around it.

Robin Ross: [00:17:01] It's perfectly acceptable to have an auto response on those things that says, thanks for contacting us, someone will be back to you within three hours. Or whatever time you've set up that works for you. But if people want to contact you immediately, they could do it the old fashioned way and just phone you.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:17:21] Absolutely. What are some easy changes people can make to their phones to be more productive? You talked about notifications, turning those off. What else can we do to help our customers or help ourselves be productive?

Robin Ross: [00:17:43] One thing is your social media apps, you can hide them in a folder, make them a little bit harder to get to. Maybe have it so you have to log in and out of them every time. Something like that, that makes it just a little bit more sticky.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:18:00] I do like that, logging in and out. That's really clever. In fact, it makes my staff cringe if they ever go to my phone because I have red dots on everything. They can't function. They're like, what are you doing? I have ten Snapchat notifications, I don't care, I have six messenger notifications. Those little red circles on everything, that freaks some people out.

Robin Ross: [00:18:28] You'll see some people will have 200 text messages unread, or emails, that sort of thing. Other people feel that it needs to be cleaned up right away.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:18:39] I have 46+ text messages, I don't know what that means. 67, I got lots going on here. It does drive some people crazy. My staff thinks, what are you doing? I don't know. Folders on your phone are very clever. For example, mine here, my Google. That's another one we could talk about, do you know anything about Google tasks?

Robin Ross: [00:19:04] I have not used the Google platform very much. A little bit.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:19:08] Okay. When you're talking about these features, does it matter if you have a Samsung or an iPhone? How do they cross over? Are they basically the same but different?

Robin Ross: [00:19:18] Basically they're the same, just using a different operating system or provider. But they all do basically the same thing.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:19:27] Are you an iPhone person or a Samsung person?

Robin Ross: [00:19:31] I have an iPhone.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:19:31] Some of my staff, they're Samsung all the way. I did create folders, then I put the social stuff in one folder, I got a health folder, business folder, banking folder. I try to do it somewhat like that, try to keep it organized a little bit.

Robin Ross: [00:19:53] You want to have those icons that you use all the time right handy. For example, I have my calendar, my texts, my reminders, my notes, the weather app, all that right on that first page.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:20:08] That's another thing I do every morning is check the weather. When I was in Florida last week, I went through and I deleted a bunch of my stuff that I don't use, so it was nice to clean that up. What else do you have to share with us? Any tips on our phones for our listeners?

Robin Ross: [00:20:28] I think the big thing is that the phones are a part of our life. They're a great tool to have, they can save you a lot of time, and make your life a lot easier. But it is about being mindful about how you use it. I think the last statistic I saw was a Deloitte statistic that said we pick our phones up an average of 96 times a day. If you look at your phone, it does keep track of that and it will show you how much time you're spending on each app.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:20:54] On each app, it tells us that?

Robin Ross: [00:20:56] It will tell you that, yeah.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:20:58] Another conversation we had in the past, it said that you can check all that kind of stuff, how much time is spent. Does it tell you how many times you picked it up as well? Everything like that, it'll tell you that? I don't even know if I want to know.

Robin Ross: [00:21:17] It is a little sobering, I'm not going to lie. I was shocked one time when I was looking at mine. I spent 45 minutes text messaging that day. I wouldn't have thought that I'd used that much time just to pick up the phone and answer somebody or send it. But yeah, 45 minutes.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:21:36] I want to know, because I think our listeners will want to know this too. I'm in settings to check that out? Where do I go from settings?

Robin Ross: [00:21:43] It's under screen time.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:21:45] Oh my lord. Daily average, see all apps and website activities. Five hours and 18 minutes, that's almost a full day of work.

Robin Ross: [00:21:58] That's true, but..

Sharon DeKoning: [00:22:01] It is work.

Robin Ross: [00:22:02] Some of it is work. But then the other thing is, if you're playing a YouTube video but you're not watching it, but you're listening to it as you do something else..

Sharon DeKoning: [00:22:11] Or a podcast or something like that? A podcast would be too.

Robin Ross: [00:22:16] If your screen is on during that time. I read a lot of books through the Kindle app, so if you read for an hour that counts into that.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:22:28] Well, that's very cool. Thank you for sharing that. I just learned something that I didn't really need to know. No, I'm just kidding. It is sobering. I am actually going to research that. I want to dissect it a bit more. What is the 5 hours and 18 minutes?

Robin Ross: [00:22:44] The big thing is, we use our phones to be more connected, but in a lot of ways we're more disconnected from people than we ever have been. If you're using your phone as a faux social interaction, use your phone to set a 1 to 1 meeting, an in-person meeting with somebody. A visit, a coffee, go for a walk. We could go to the track. Use it that way.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:23:17] You're so right. I've read about that, how we're least social in the most social world right now. It's unfortunate, actually. I always thought it was because everything is fast forward. Originally I used to think that, but if I just spent five hours in a day, I could have been going for a coffee for an hour. Interesting. Sobering, isn't it. What do you think about our youth coming up? What do you foresee in our 20 year olds when they're 40, with technology evolution?

Robin Ross: [00:23:55] I'm finding that as a middle aged person, we have this presumption that all of our younger people are very tech savvy, and I'm finding that's not necessarily the case. They're using it enough for what they need to use it for, a lot of them. Some of them are very tech savvy, don't get me wrong, but not all of them are. The thing is, who's to say in 20 years what that's even going to look like?

Sharon DeKoning: [00:24:26] We might not even have to type or do anything anymore. One thing that resonated with me, one of my team, she's young, she just started here. She had ChatGPT open and I'm like, what are you doing with that? She's like, I don't think our customers want me to put 'ttyl' at the end of our emails. She will type up something and get ChatGPT to reword it with proper punctuation. Because at that age they've never actually had to write a letter, isn't that crazy? As an employer, I have to recognize and adjust my way of thinking with all this stuff. I have to be able to shift and be mindful of all this kind of stuff that's going on in this new age coming out.

Robin Ross: [00:25:18] It's very different. I think there is a place for AI with writing as far as cleaning up or writing that message. But what you also need to be careful with is, AI can be very insincere. If you put something into AI and you send me an email I'll say to myself, that doesn't sound like Sharon. It's great for cleaning up, but you want to be careful when you're sending that message.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:25:50] I'm pretty sure AI will remove my swear words when I'm typing something up. You know it's not Sharon. Anything else you want to chat about before we sign off here, Robin? I really appreciate you joining us.

Robin Ross: [00:26:04] I don't think so.

Sharon DeKoning: [00:26:05] Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. To our listeners, I hope you've gained some tips and inspiration, and I hope that you reach out to Robin for any assistance or phones in the future. She's there to help, her and her team, she's got a great staff there. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast and share this episode with anyone who might find it helpful. Until next time, stay productive and use your time wisely. Thank you, Robin.

Robin Ross: [00:26:28] Thanks very much, Sharon.