Turn off your notifications already
No, seriously.
If you’re here today, reading this, you probably have a tiny inkling of a desire to reshape your relationship with technology. Maybe you’re considering cutting social media, or maybe just simply, you want to be more present with other people.
It can feel daunting to start this journey. And well, it kind of is. To really transform the way you use technology, you have to make some major changes to your daily habits. As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, “The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
Today though, I’m going to give you a very simple step — one that you can take well before you’re really ready to start any major overhauling. Think of it as a pre-step. A way to dip your toes in the waters…
Turn off your notifications! (No, seriously.) You probably heard the advice before, but today, I’m telling you to take some action, and here’s why.
Focus is lost
Our ability to focus has been obliterated. There are countless studies and essays on the subject, I’ll share a few for you:
How does technology affect the attention span of different age groups
Students can't resist distraction for two minutes ... and neither can you
Even glancing at a notification on your phone, while focusing on another task, shifts your brain’s focus. From the American Psychological Association, “brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s proactive time.”
A study conducted between University of California, Irvine and Humboldt University found that after a notification interrupts our focus to a new task, it can take us about 23 minutes to get back to the original task. The study also found we aim to make up for that lost time, but it’s costly: “our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort.”
Slippery slope
When you get an alert on your phone, you’re likely to engage with it — you’ll open the text, read the email, and reply if it’s important. This typically snowballs. From Harvard Business Review, “You visit your inbox, you respond to that email, and while you’re there, you notice and respond to several other emails. You bask in an accomplishment-driven dopamine hit and thirty minutes later, you remember that you were working on a more important and difficult piece of work that’s due by day’s end.” Sound familiar? I have a lingering habit of always checking my inbox before putting down my phone, no matter what app first brought me to pick up my phone in the first place. It’s compulsive, I will always open Gmail, even when I know there are likely no new emails I need to attend to.
Be present with others
A friend is telling you an important story. You’re engaged. You get an alert on your phone, and without even meaning to, you check it. It’s instinctual, but now you’ve lost your focus. It turns out there’s a word for this – phubbing – snubbing someone to look at your phone.
We owe each other more. A study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that the mere presence of mobile phones — in this case, the phone was placed out of the study participants direct field of vision — interfered with relationships, especially when people were having meaningful conversations. With our actions, we are saying to our friends and family: this device I am holding is more important than you.
You aren’t just hurting other people’s feelings when you use your phone, you’re also ruining your own mood. This study examined how phones affect social interactions. The researchers set up two experiments. In the first, they observed participants at shared meals with friends and family. They found that “during in-person interactions, participants felt more distracted and reported lower enjoyment if they used their phones than if they did not.” In a further experiment, they learned this effect transcends meal time. They found that if the participants had been on their phone while having a face-to-face interaction, they enjoyed the interaction less than participants who had been face-to-face with a person without their phone.
You have the control
Social media platforms are literally designed to keep you on them longer. If a notification sucks you in, you will be there for longer than you intend. You’ll chase the dopamine hit.
When I left my career to parent full-time, I turned off most of my notifications. I left on text messages, phone calls, and breaking news alerts from the NYT app. Then, something funny happened. I still don’t quite understand why, but my NYT notifications just stopped working. Even today, if you look at my settings, both in my phone and the app itself, I technically still have them “on.” Yet, they never come through.
At first I found this frustrating. I always felt like I was late to learning breaking news. Slowly, I got used to it. When Biden was declared president, I was out in my town walking. I noticed a shift in the energy around me. I heard people discussing the big news. When January 6th happened, I didn’t learn about it for hours until a friend texted me “what is going on?” This past July, when Biden dropped out of the race for the presidency, I was cooking dinner. I found out an hour after the news broke because my husband came in to say, “Did you see the news!?”
You will always find out the breaking news one way or another. You don’t have to be the first to know. In fact, I almost cherished that hour before I learned about Biden stepping down. After I found out, we were glued to the news cycle with a nearing-frenetic energy.
In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari discusses a two month digital detox he experienced on a journey to reshape his own habits. As a journalist, he had previously spent a lot of time on X (or Twitter), where he consistently got his news updates. During his time offline, he began reading the newspaper once a day, getting a thorough in-depth summary of what had happened the day before. In describing this practice, he says “my normal mode of consuming news, I realized, induced panic; this new style induced perspective."
Hari expands on how much information we are receiving at all times, discussing the subject with Danish professor Sune Lehmann: "There's this thing about speed that feels great... Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it's awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it." Something is lost in that speed, however. He explains, “Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection.”
It is rare that something is really an emergency or time pertinent. The news event won’t unhappen, and if you learn about it hours or a day later, chances are that the story will be more fully fleshed out. There will be depth in your understanding.
Turning off notifications gives you a new power: you have control over what you consume and when. You get to decide — will I look at the news? Will I catch up on emails? Will I check my social media feed?
You don’t need tech companies making this decision for you.
Take back control
It’s simple, but can be a major shift to turn your notifications off. Here’s some tips to make the process seamless:
Make a list of the notifications you absolutely do need to receive. Narrow this list even further by blocking the notifications into different times of the day. During my kid’s school hours, I keep on phone calls and text message notifications in case the school needs to reach out to me. After pick up, I switch my phone over to Do Not Disturb. I have a rule set up that will still allow phone calls from my husband, or if someone calls me back-to-back.
Turn off badges. These are unnecessary and only create temptation to open an app you didn’t plan to use.
Customize your controls. Apple and Android phones have evolved their notification features quite a bit over the years. You can set up different settings for specific times and locations — for example, you can employ a “no email notifications at home” rule. Take some time to focus on the settings for you phone and optimize them to serve you.
Remember, your phone is a tool. It can serve a lot of functions, but it should never control you. This is the simplest step you can take to begin reshaping your relationship with technology.
You have the power. Now, yield it.
Hi reader. In the coming weeks, I’m launching a new reader Q&A series. If you have a question about digital minimalism or starting your own journey to break free from the internet, shoot me a message at the link below.