Do Not Disturb
Taking the step to enable DND 24/7 was one of the best decisions I could make for inviting more calm, focus, and clarity into my day.
A few weeks ago, I accidentally turned on Do Not Disturb, not for an hour, not until the evening, not until I left my current location, but in perpetuity. I haven't turned it off, nor have I wanted to, and honestly, it's one of the best decisions I've made in a long time.
Do Not Disturb (DND) first debuted on iOS in 2012, so it's not exactly new. While DND has always offered the ability to put the phone into DND for a specific reoccurring period, new features have been added over the years, including the ability to send DND messages while driving. More recently, DND expanded to be enabled for more nuanced periods (i.e., for the hour, until you leave your current location, or until the event in your calendar ends). A scheduled DND took care of notifications during the night, but it offered little refuge from the messages, banners, and buzzes my devices received during the day.
The solution to disable all, if not most, notifications might seem blatantly obvious. But what kept me allowing notifications to persist was twofold. First, they straddled the line of being just convenient enough that I often decide to keep them around. And by the time I eventually got irritated enough that I wanted to react, whatever app was seeking my attention had often quieted down.
Second, the process of sorting through and deciding which specific notifications to allow for which apps can quickly become cumbersome. Take just one sports app, for example: if I enable notifications, I then have the option of receiving any of a dozen different alerts (News, Warmup, Game Start, Goals, Overtime, Final Score, etc.) for each team on any particular night. This process of manually tuning a dozen settings across dozens of apps felt daunting, leading to inaction and avoidance on my part.
It was only by chance that I left Do Not Disturb on, and only after a few days with DND constantly enabled that I noticed that I hadn't missed anything, nor had I gotten as frustrated or distracted by my devices. The urgency to respond and continuously redirect my attention had evaporated. Now I was in charge of what I checked & when I checked it.
And by no means was I getting bombarded by hundreds of notifications. At most, they averaged around 65 per day, though they ranged anywhere from 48 to as many as 106 per day. Averaged across a day, a new notification breaks my flow once every 14 minutes of every waking hour. Worse, my notifications were all primarily skewed towards the end of the day, precisely when I wanted to disengage and focus on not being tethered to my devices—each haptic buzz, banner, or ding an invitation to distraction. Over time the goal became trying to remain focused despite these distractions; a completely ass-backwards approach! And it wasn't just my notification that I needed to contend with, but the 80 or so alerts that pinged my partner’s devices as well. Taken together, that averaged out to one new notification between us every six minutes!
The Top 3 culprits for notifications are: 1. News, 2. Twitter, & 3. Messages.
I think we can all appreciate that notifications might occasionally break our flow. Still, I don't think I had ever appreciated how detrimental or severe these interruptions were until they all disappeared. There is a time cost and an attentional residue associated each time a notification arrives. When an alert comes through, even as just a banner, it interrupts the flow of whatever I was working on to process the incoming information. Breaking away from my task, I have to consider what I want to do with the incoming notification (ignore it, respond, save it for later, etc.). And third, after reacting or responding to it, I then need to return to my original train of thought. The harm of these interruptions and task switching is often underestimated (or worse, revered as multi-tasking), but a growing body of literature suggests this task-switching is far more harmful to our performance and creativity than we might appreciate or recognize.
Three weeks into this experiment, I can say there hasn’t been much I missed and nothing that I have regretted. I currently have DND enabled on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone (only allowing call notifications on my iPhone). After several weeks, there has been the odd message that I have responded to late, but nothing more than that. The most significant barrier to implementing this was my belief about needing to respond and attend to notifications as promptly as possible. By removing notifications and prioritizing times for specific tasks, I have felt more clarity, less anxiety, and more focus throughout the day.
It might sound like I'm overselling it, but give it a fair shot for 4-5 days and let me know whether it's made any difference in your life.
