Reduce Phone Notifications
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
Jason and I recently recorded a book club chat on the book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal and Julie Li. You can view that discussion here. One statistic cited in the book that stood out to me was that 85% of app users don’t adjust their notifications. So for the majority of people, for every app that they add to their phone, each of those apps is probably dinging at them at some point during the day. Because apps want to ding at us as a default. They want to produce a siren song that we can’t resist to get us onto their platform to either buy what they have to sell or gain our attention for advertisers that have something to sell. Our attention is money, and the constant dings are ways to almost guarantee that attention.
But we don’t have to give our attention to every app on our phones. We can turn notifications off on every app from which we don’t need audible reminders. If you go into the Settings area of your phone, there will be an Apps & notifications option where you can manually turn off every notification for every app on your phone. Personally, on my phone, the only apps that are allowed to make noise at me are phone calls, text messages, and my alarm clock. Everything else – Facebook, Instagram, eBay, Amazon, Messenger, YouTube – is silenced, and I get to them when I decide to visit them. They don’t get to ding and create a Pavlovian response where I mindlessly wander to them.
I encourage you to experiment with the notifications on your phone. Turn off as many as possible, and see if you miss any of them. You can always turn them back on if you truly find them of value. But the time you can save by turning off the sounds and reducing the stimuli that try to distract you can be very real and redirected toward pursuits that have actual meaning to you.
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Purposefully Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team