Zero Notifications
I’m now doing a Sunday post as well, so you can now expect to get your favourite newsletter about time management for the hybrid working professional four times a week!
With that excellent notification (hmm…) out of the way…do you find yourself drowning in a sea of notifications on your phone, from "You might like a new robot vacuum cleaner" (creepy, right?) to random updates on what some annoying Instagram influencer is up to? It's like a never-ending parade of distractions that can shoot your productivity to pieces faster than you can say "swipe left." I mean, do you really need to be told when Facebook has suggested you might know someone living in a country you’ve never been to or when Netflix adds a new show you’re definitely never going to watch?
Kill Your Notifications
It's time to pin down the culprit here: push/popup notifications. They're the secret agents of distraction, continually beckoning for your attention. It’s not smartphones themselves that are the problem as such, but the constant buzzing and pinging with things that aren’t really important. Luckily, there's a simple solution: Kill your notifications. Seriously, turn them all off (except for phone calls and calendar/task reminders; it’s debatable whether text messages or emails need popping up—if it’s really an emergency, someone will ring you).
Don’t Give Up Your Time
You'll quickly see those notifications were only helping the brands and app developers trying to get your attention. The supreme irony is that push notifications, to use the technical jargon, were originally meant to free you from constantly checking your phone. Funny how that turned out. Marketing departments quickly realised these notifications look just like text messages or emails, tricking users into looking before they can dismiss them. It's like your phone has become a battleground where companies compete for your eyeballs.
Turn it All Off
So go ahead and disable notifications from social media apps, shopping apps, fitness apps, and everything else that's trying to get your attention. It can be a bit tedious, but the payoff is so worth it. Leave only the essentials (again: phone calls and calendar/task reminders). I personally turn off WhatsApp and SMS sound notifications, but keep them visible so I will see them when I do check my phone. With WhatsApp, I’d also recommend ‘muting’ any groups so you don’t get continually pinged each time somebody moans about pigeons on the roof (yes, I’m on far too many local neighbourhood groups…).
If you really don’t want to sit down and look through your apps, do it this way: each time you get a notification, see if you actually want to receive ones like it again. If you don’t, turn them off for that app there and then. Over a week or so, you’ll start seeing fewer notifications, until you only get the ones that are really helpful to you.
Make Them Silent
Another approach, if you really don’t want to completely get rid of all those notifications is to make them silent, so they don’t distract you. You can usually set up ‘quiet hours’ as well on most modern phones, so you don’t get any notifications between certain times of day (e.g. when you are working or alseep). Personally, I don’t want to be spending precious minutes of my life swiping away Uber or Amazon offers, so I just turn them off full stop. If I feel like I want to do some shopping, I’ll open the Amazon app and check out any offers—my time, my way.
Turning off your notifications will give you far more control of your phone, and not hearing those ‘bings’ will allow you to stay focused when you are churning through that daily calendar.