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by MattKimber
1901 days ago
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At the start of this year I started an experiment; whenever an application distracted me more than once per day with a push notification or toast, it would have its permissions to send any notification of any type revoked. Even if it was a work-related app, probably the scariest category of things to turn off. A surprise for me was that once the biggest offenders were turned off, my brain craved the low-reward distraction fix - I would find myself compulsively refreshing Twitter or a forum in the hope of getting that same brief, low-value, "here is something you need to look at" reward. But it didn't come, and while I lost close to a month of leisure time on compulsive-refreshing I found that "there is no reward here" eventually filtered through to my subconscious. The other shock was how little people at work noticed the difference between "I have a notification, let me respond to that" and "I'm at a nice break, let me check my messages". I thought median response time going from a few seconds to a few minutes would be problematic but nobody even notices. (Perhaps they're also too distracted?) Of course there is the worst case that I get head down in something and then I'm 2-3 hours out before I can get back, but it helps we have a team where we can be quite open with the idea of, "I quit Slack if I need focus time, here are emergency ways to contact me if necessary" I am not yet back to reading books. I hope that will come in time. But I definitely find myself better at engaging with long-form entertainment, without stopping and getting distracted within the first few minutes. |
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My experience is that these habits work until "the pillars" of my life (people, place, and routine) shift. I had low screen-time before COVID: but not after. Buying a new house had similar affect. A new friend or social media app (looking at you Clubhouse) interrupts my flow and I fall back into the scroll-hole once again.
Every few months I need to re-learn how to fight against the PC in my pocket. I always find a way. But never get the sense that I've "leveled-up".