An easy way to forward all of your calls to voice mail is to use the *90*[ext]. This will call forward every call that rings on your phone to your voicemail box.
The problem, as you suspect, is that if your phone rings, it will immediately forward the call to your voice mail.
If you were using queues instead of ring groups, you could have excluded yourself by not logging into the queue, but I don’t think you can get there from here.