Tag: attention

Notifications are Bad and You Should Feel Bad

This is a rant against notifications.

Notifications are those things you have on your phone, tablet or computer that pop up in the corner of your screen when you get an email, meeting invite, Twitter reply, or a file change in Dropbox.

I’d even extend the buggery of notifications to the badge alerts for anything not mentioned in this footnote1. Why do I need a badge on my Draw Something icon? Of course there are people in there waiting for me to play. That’s the entire premise of the app!

If you’re like me, every time I see little red badge holding a number I get anxious. I need to check that app! I have to get rid of the number! I don’t care if my Aunt called me and left an important voicemail – I’m going to open the Phone app just to make the badge go away.

We don’t need the mental stress of being reminded of things that are not immediate to the work we’re doing.

Outlook has had these pop-ups for years2 and on the Mac, Growl has been around for a while and quite successful. Notification Center in iOS and now OS X Mountain Lion continue the trend of annoying people under the guise of productivity.

These things are useless. Out of the box, you’re likely to have half a dozen or more applications vying for your attention. The promise of notifications is that you’ll be more productive – quicker to react to things that require your attention.

After a few weeks with Mountain Lion, here’s the apps that are in Notification Center:

Not pictured: Twitter, Google Chrome, Tweetbot and Mail!

Notifications give you the false impression of being productive, but in reality they merely distract you from whatever focused work you were trying to accomplish. It’s a pavlovian response when you hear that ding that you need to act upon it. Most people, myself included, don’t have the willpower to simply ignore those chimes, dings and rings. We have to look.

I use to love notifications. I used Growl for a long time3, and when I got my first iPhone Notification Center was filled with dozens of apps. I use to think, “What if I get a Game Center request? What if I get a super awesome email at 11 o’clock at night!?

But that’s the rub, innit?

Notifications are useless. You don’t need them. They are distracting, they break your train of thought and inhibit your ability to focus on whatever task you’re working on. Even if you ignore them, your subconscious spends time pondering the content while you try to continue working on what is in front of you.

So here’s a challenge. Turn off some of  your notifications. Pick five apps that display a pop-up or a badge and turn them off for a week. See what happens. I bet dollars to doughnuts that you don’t notice they’re missing. You might even notice (see what I did there) that you’re a little more focused on the essential than the urgent.

Bonus: As I was writing this, my good friend and I cracked a joke.

 

 

Email is Dead, Long Live Email

Note: I originally posted this to our internal discussion board at work looking for feedback. I wanted to share and archive it here as I think it’s a common problem for a lot of people and organizations.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about how we communicate as an organization and would like to publicly decree that I’m out to kill how we use email. No, I’m not going to go dismantle the Exchange server or anything like that, but rather I’d like to help figure out what went wrong when email was unleashed upon the world and take back control of our time and attention.

Like some villainous fungus sprung up in a night we have no natural defenses against it. We check it so frequently that it’s become an almost Pavlovian response to look at a screen when you hear a small chime. We use it to send out time sensitive and critical information, yet it was designed to be a passive asynchronous medium. We check it at work and at play – a times of the day where you can’t do anything about it other than fret. I’ve even been in meetings where people are checking email for other work and not paying attention to the work at hand!

What can we do to establish a more productive and sane email culture? I realize it’s not solely email’s fault for our difficulty in focusing on one thing at a time (and don’t get me started on the myth of multitasking), but we have to start somewhere.

So let’s start. Please join me and share you best advice for handling email. What tips and tricks do you use to help keep your head above the water and remain a well-functioning and communicative co-worker?

I’ll kick off with a few ideas of my own.

  • How do you create intelligent subject lines?
    Are you asking a question? Start the subject with “Question – blah blah blah”. Meeting invite? “Meeting Invite – blah blah blah”
  • Best practices for managing inbox cruft?
    You’ll never read those 113 newsletters you subscribed to about. Unsubscribe now, it’s ok. Use filters to automatically prioritize work. Email from a person or thing (like MTS Alerts) that are often high priority – filter them to an “Important” sub-folder. Med or low priority to a “Not So Important” sub-folder.
  • What’s the socially acceptable way to reply to a confirmation of something?
    Answer: single sentence email replies – bad. Elaborate or don’t bother to reply.
  • Did anyone ever attend “How to use Email and not go Totally Insane 101” when they first got email?
    No!? Why not? Should we host a Communities of Knowledge or workshop around email best practices?

Here’s some recent and related articles I’ve been reading that has me all riled up. I don’t have all the answers on how we can better leverage our time – and more importantly our attention, but here’s to a start.

And of course the always excellent Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” (YouTube)