This topic is pretty light, but damn it yields some good bang for your buck. Here is a recent discovery that might help others!
If you notify others to call or text when something is urgent, you are then free to turn off all notifications. Anything app-related: emails, news, social media, videos, posts, messages, group chats… All of it.
It seems like “oh my goodness, but how will I know about ____”. Turns out, you will check it anyway and usually more often than you’d anticipate (or even want to? Ha!). I still check urgent things regularly, like work emails on an ongoing basis, family and friend communications once to twice a day, news whenever I have bandwidth for analysis, etc. If I know I have a crisis situation on hand, I may switch on a specific notification for half a day or a day, and then turn it back off.
However, overall, app notifications are off. On all devices. Nothing is yelling at me, grabbing my attention, flashing, pinging, or anything else. I have spared myself HOURS of lost productivity, from random rabbit holes, to momentary loss of focus, to emotions or thoughts that may arise in response to some prompt I didn’t choose or even consent to. We are 100% not wired to be this distracted, saturated with content, or processing on so many streams simultaneously all the time, even if we can truly multitask (which is debated but not the focus here!).
Just think about it: every single one of these things has been engineered specifically to outperform its competitors in grabbing and keeping your attention. Endless high perceptual and emotional salience stimuli, coming at you, over and over, all day. They are at best agnostic in their valence, and at worst, aimed at making you some kind of dysregulated so that you stay engaged or buy stuff. Picture them like cartoon characters, saying your name, whispering, saying, yelling “hey ____, look at this! Did you know this? I need you right now, right now, RIGHT NOW. Hey. Hey ____.”. Would you be friends with that person? I wouldn’t.
Off the notifications go. I haven’t missed a single emergency due to this method. I have gained so much peace of mind, nervous system stability, and JOY though 🙂