It’s the notifications, stupid!

Neil Taggart
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

“We are everyday robots on our phones…”

Image credit: https://blog.intercom.com/its-time-for-notifications-to-get-smart/ — good article too

So sings Damon Albarn. There are plenty of articles, anecdotes and memes lamenting the use of phones in our lives. Whether it’s teenagers sitting together, each fiddling with their own screen, or funny videos of people walking into lamp posts while texting, or that couple you see dining out failing to distract themselves from their phones. A study by Deloitte in 2016 found that people look at their phones 47 times a day, on average. Almost double that for young people.

We have all found ourselves doing it at some point, either as a distraction or a purposeful action that then distracts us into zoning out of the reality around us. And there’s the root of it: distraction. This little black mirror that we all carry is the ultimate distractor.

What’s the antidote?

While the obvious answer is to disconnect, that’s impractical for most of us, most of the time. But there’s a simple way to reduce the affliction and ease the addiction: control your notifications. These are the dings, whistles, pops, burps that our phone makes for a plethora of reasons — mostly because our self-important apps want to distract us and we let them. Control these, and you may be surprised by how much less distracting your phone is.

What do you need to be notified of? What would you sacrifice your precious, hard-sought focus for? A game telling you that it has new artifacts to buy? Hardly. Somebody liking your social media post? The real notification there is that you probably need to work on your social life, not your social network. No, the only things that should distract you are urgent and important events. So if an event is urgent and important enough, how will people contact you? By email? Maybe if it’s important, but if it’s really urgent they’ll call you — if only to say “did you see the email I sent you?” [only 2 minutes ago, because you evidently have nothing better to do than stare at your inbox all day. We all know these people. If you don’t, you probably are one].

Try it. Switch off all notifications except phone calls, for a week.

That’s where I started from. Then I added back red dot notifications (the little number in the corner of the icon) for certain messaging apps, as they could sometimes be semi-urgent. No sound or pop-ups, just the red dots. Email has the red dot, but is only checked three times a day — the number is an at-a-glance indicator of email traffic, rather than the call to arms it used to be. Friends and colleagues know this, so if there are more urgent matters they call or skype. My smart watch (a Pebble time) has a vibrating pulse for calendar events and one messaging app, with the added advantage of previewing the content, so I can discretely glance to see if it is distraction-worthy and quickly dismiss it if not.

iPhones are actually better than Android phones for this. The latter offer no control of background apps (other than disabling them) and the notification settings are not as granular or straightforward as iPhones. The latest Android release (Nougat) does, apparently, address this.

Phones are as distracting as you want them to be. Taking control of notifications not only reduces distraction but can even change how people interact with you — for the better.

Neil Taggart

Written by

Father of 2 and founder of Adaptive Consulting (@AdaptiveC): all about making IT investments work, which is more fun than most people think.

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