Notifications? No thks!

It’s my fault. Of course. In my opinion, it’s very hard to define what is important and urgent; important, but not urgent; urgent, but not important; and not urgent and not important. It’s super hard.

Every day I try to have fewer meetings. They are important, but in my opinion they are also overrated. That’s why I try to make them as short and straight to the point. In one of these meetings, I noticed that in every two minutes I was checking my iPad.

But, why? Because there were nonstop notifications of apps and I simply couldn’t stop looking to see what was happening. And damn, I got upset with myself! My meeting was already short and I was more focused on the notifications.

I realized then that I fell into my own trap and I didn’t define what was important and urgent; important, but not urgent; urgent, but not important; and not urgent and not important.

Notifications and urgency

Notifications create a feeling of urgency around something that ends up not being important. In fact, I don’t need to know immediately that someone retweeted my tweet. I started noticing that, that a minimal alteration (such as a retweet) would have a huge impact on me.

“There are two types of people: One strives to control his environment, the other strives not to let his environment control him. I like to control my environment.” George Carlin

The thing that pleases me the most is that, by turning off all notifications, I am the one that decides when to check my e-mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. And all that happens, happens because of me. And that may seem weird, but I love this feeling.

Receiving notifications were my fault, and by controlling this part of my environment, all becomes clearer. And now that this is on me, I can work on myself, get better and check these notifications a lot less.

I highly recommend you to try it.

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