Notifications are a decision somebody else made
Every alert on your phone was switched on by a stranger with an interest in your attention. Almost none of them were switched on by you.
Open the notification settings on your phone and read the list as what it is: a record of decisions about when you should be interrupted, made almost entirely by people who do not know what you are doing at that moment.
The defaults are not neutral. For most apps, an interruption is the business model.
The only two that earn it
A notification is justified when it is both time-critical and from a person. Someone is late; the school is calling; the delivery is at the door now.
Everything else — the newsletter, the like, the reminder that you have not opened something in three days — is an advertisement for the app, dressed as information. It can wait for you to look, which you will, because you always do.
The twenty-minute argument
An interruption does not cost its own length. Observational research on office work found interrupted tasks resumed after about 23 minutes on average, with other tasks in between (1). Even allowing for how that number is measured, a buzz during something difficult is not a two-second event.
Six such buzzes in an afternoon do not leave an afternoon behind them.
A ten-minute clean-up
Turn everything off. Not down — off, all of it, in one pass. Then switch back on only what you miss within a week, which is usually messages from humans and a calendar alert.
Expect to miss almost nothing. That is the finding, and it is slightly insulting: the volume was never about you needing to know.
Sources
- 1. Mark, G., on observational studies of workplace interruption: work was resumed after about 23 minutes, with roughly two intervening tasks (Gallup Business Journal interview). Open