The perfect balanced seemed to be having limited and easy to turn on and off access. While I didn't have wifi most of the time, I had setup my phone to be a tethered modem. Now this isn't exactly in line with the User Agreement of my carrier and that fact kept me from having it on the whole time.
The point is, I turned on the internet only when I needed it, which turned out to be less than 5 minutes every hour. Five minutes. That's crazy to me considering how many times per MINUTE I get dings and chirps and whistles all from internet driven activity.
Of course I wasn't doing many video conferences etc, but for getting actual work done, it seemed to workout really well. I may start trying this more often....we'll see.