(FORTUNE Magazine) – My kids have just gone back to school. I'm back from vacation with the wife. So hello again.

There must be a gene that makes me want to write about what I did on my summer vacation. Or what I didn't do. I didn't take my computer. I didn't check my voice mail or my e-mail. I didn't have withdrawal. In fact, I'd have to say that I started to think major thoughts about just how important these things are in the scheme of things. I might even have had a life-changing epiphany.

Let's start with this simple fact: We haven't been living in this modern, ultra-interconnected world for very long. I had my first voice-mail system in 1982, I think. And I got my first e-mail account, on MCI Mail, in 1986. I know I was an early user of e-mail--back then, there just weren't very many other people who could exchange messages with me. And I think I was fairly early with voice mail--in those days, whether you had voice mail or not was solely a function of whom you worked for. Consumer voice mail was not yet an issue.

Then came this decade. In just the past ten years, leaving messages has come to occupy more of my waking minutes than talking to people, either on the phone or in person. When I got back from my two-week vacation this summer, I had accumulated more than 700 e-mail messages, despite turning on the "out of office" feature that tells people that I won't read my e-mail. I got just four or five voice mails, all from people who must be simply brimming with optimism, given that I had changed my outgoing message to tell people explicitly that they should avoid leaving me a message.

This leads me to Epiphany No. 1: If I don't respond to a message that someone's left me, tough cookies.

When I first started using asynchronous communications--electronic mail and voice mail--I operated on the premise that I would respond to every message. I'm a polite person, and that felt polite. I got kind of religious about it, and I tended to get hot under the collar when I encountered rude people--people who didn't worry about returning phone calls or responding to e-mail unless they wanted to.

As e-mail and voice mail became more and more a part of my life, I became less and less religious about this principle. In 1987, when Prodigy became available, I wrote a daily column for subscribers. The column was successful enough that I started getting 200 messages a day. I responded to every one. That got really boring really fast. But my motivation never flagged--after all, the company was paying me to respond to those messages.

Since then, I've written for various print and electronic publishers, with increasingly larger circulations. Not surprisingly, more and more people decided they wanted to tell me something, primarily via e-mail. As a first step, I stopped trying to be timely. I responded to e-mail only when I could, which meant taking time every couple of weeks to beat my in-box down to one screenful. The best time to do that was on a bicoastal roundtrip, since it took about two three-hour sessions. Then at some point, I stopped responding to every message. I began to believe that I was still being polite by reading every message. Responding became something more than politeness.

That too has evolved. Recently I've been feeling more and more guilty because I haven't even had time to read every message I get. As I write this column, I have 140 unread messages out of the 579 in my in-box. So I've read 439 messages without disposing of them, and I haven't read another 140. The oldest unread message was sent on June 12, nearly three months ago.

Only this summer, as I traveled around Italy and France without my computer, did I begin to realize that I had gotten it all wrong from the very beginning. The fact that someone sends me a message does not automatically impose an obligation on my part to respond. If that were true, then it would logically follow that I should allow strangers to rule my life. I don't like that idea. So I've started to delete messages without reading them.

That's a useful thing to remember when you send me or anyone else a message: It's your job to make it interesting enough to get a response, if that's what you want. You have to learn how to use the subject line to get the message opened. You have to learn to type and spell and write well enough that the message gets read. You have to remember that you are not the only human being on earth writing e-mail messages! In fact, you're little more than a little face in a very, very large crowd: By some estimates, hundreds of millions of people now have e-mail addresses.

And that, dear reader, leads to Epiphany No. 2: Hang up first, ask questions later.

My insight about e-mail led me to reexamine how I use voice mail and the telephone. Recently, I've begun trying to not answer the telephone. That's right: I just sit there and listen to it ring without picking it up. Who ever said that a ringing telephone should make you drop everything that you're doing and pick it up? And when someone leaves a message in my voice mail, sometimes I just delete it without ever intending to respond. (Of course, this plan sometimes goes awry: I am still trying to figure out how to remember that the delete and save commands on my home and work voice-mail systems are the exact opposite of each other.) I feel liberated. As if I'm in control.

Let me tell you how far it has gone: Just last week, I hung up on a salesman who called me at home. I hung up on the man while he was in mid-sentence. Sure, I used to take the time to tell his kind that I didn't want to talk. But why should I? I didn't ask him to call and I don't want to talk to him, so what's wrong with just hanging up? In fact, I've begun to realize that the best way to keep the world around you from taking control of your life is by not responding. Hang up on salespeople. Delete voice mails without reading them. Do not respond to e-mail messages. Don't respond to direct-mail solicitations, whether they're sent by e-mail or via the U.S. Postal Service. Some good may come of all your unresponsiveness: So much of our life is now automated that if you get tagged as a non-responder, the computers will sort you out as a low-potential prospect and stop sending you stuff or telling salespeople to call you.

I think I had a pretty successful summer vacation. It's not every year that you come back not only feeling refreshed and relaxed, but also with epiphanies about how to get control over your life. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go delete some more e-mails!

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He may be reached at stewart_alsop@fortunemail.com; the column may be bookmarked at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop/.