☄️ Emerging from the Notification Hellscape

Every app on your phone wants your attention. Right now.

Every store you've ever purchased from wants you adding more to your shopping cart. Every news outlet wants you reacting to the latest headline. Every social media platform wants your eyeballs, feeding you a mix of content finely tuned to capture your specific attention. How considerate.

To get you back when you have the audacity to leave, these apps send you notification after notification, taking advantage of the broad permissions you granted them by default when they were first installed.

Welcome to the notification hellscape. Luckily, there's a pretty darn simple way to climb out: turn off a bunch of notifications.

Seriously. Do it right now. Pull out your phone, look at your settings, and find at least one app notification  you can disable.

You might be thinking that notifications aren't a problem because they aren't really distracting you. You're probably wrong.

I never stop telling people one simple truth: multitasking is a lie. I'm so committed that I wrote a jingle about it. If you're trying to do one task and you get pulled into another, it's best to acknowledge that you cannot actually do both things well at the same time.

Even if the distraction is minimal, don't underestimate attention residue: some part of whatever information you just took in will stay with you, even if you aren't actively thinking about it.

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Here's the threshold question: is this something I need to be notified of?

If you actually look through your notifications and see all the things you're permitting to harvest your attention, you can almost certainly find things to switch off.

Think about it this way: what's the consequence of not receiving a particular notification?

Do you really need the headline news every minute of your waking hours? (no)

Do you really need to be alerted to every email? (no)

Do you really need to be alerted to any email? (maybe not)

The list goes on.

And here's the follow-up question: do I need to be actively notified, or is passive awareness sufficient?

There are some things you do want to be aware of but that don't require active notification. Email is, again, a good example. What would it look like to turn off notifications and instead check hourly during the workday? Mileage and feasibility varies widely here, but I'll share personally that the more distance I've been able to put between myself and my notification-driven inbox, the better off I am.

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Give it a shot. You have virtually nothing to lose by switching these things off, but you have so much precious attention to gain.