Notifications Steal From You

Notifications are stealing from you. I am talking about your time but your time is money right?

How Notifcations Are Stealing From You

Your phone pings with a notification or an email notification pops up in the corner of your laptop whilst you are working. What do you do? I reckon you do the same thing I do. You pick up your phone or you click on the email to find out more.

Notifications are designeed to do just that. They want your attention and do their best to grab it. Every app you download will ask you if you want to enable notifications. They ask you that because they want you to use their app. They want your attention.

This can be a good thing for certain things. You may want your calender to notify you of an imminent meeting. However I believe the majority of your notifications will be needless information or information that you do not need to urgently know.

Why You Allow Notifications To Steal From You

Notifications stealing your time is probably something that you haven't given much thought. This is probably the main reason you happily give needless notifications your time.

You may be working on a task that you don't enjoy too much, a notification pops up and this gives you an excuse to pull yourself away from this boring task. Before you know it you have spent 15 minutes on the distraction and not moved on from getting that boring (but necessary) task done.

The fact is that notifications help you to procrastinate and procrastination is normally not a good thing.

How You Can Stop Notifications Stealing From You

The obvious way to stop notifications stealing your time is to just ignore them. However although you may be able to do this for a day or two it will not be sustainable.

It is like telling yourself you are going to eat healthily but having sugary snacks sitting in front of you all day. It will be a struggle to do and soon enough you will give in to the temptation.

I took inspiration from the book The 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris. He speaks about how turning your notifications off takes the distraction out of the equation and then you can get your tasks done and assign an hour or two a day to check those emails, chat, etc.

The book Atomic Habits by James Clear also talks about how you can get rid of bad habits is to make bad habits harder to do. Turning your notifications off stops your distractions at source. How can you be distracted by something you don't know is there?

So I put this in practice. At work I turned off all notifications to do with Outlook and Teams so when I get an email or chat message it does not pop up as a notification. I also set aside an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon where I would catch up on all of those emails and chat.

This completely changed things for me. It made me so much more productive and meant I did not get annoyed each time I was interuppted. I was also able to complete tasks to a better standard also as the more you focus on something the better the result.

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Thanks for reading,

Gav