If I had a nickel for every Medium post I’ve read on the value of turning off notifications and unplugging… I’d probably own Medium.
I’m not the first to write an article about turning off notifcations, and dare I predict I won’t be the last. Still, I feel compelled to scribble my own addition to the genre and implore you to take this more seriously than I have in the past.
Here’s what happened to me last week.
Total burnout
Following a good but stressful week of business travel in California (I’m currently freelance consulting for three companies and editing on the side), I returned to New York feeling tired and burned out.
I had this nagging sense of being constantly besieged by requests for my attention. I was feeling spread too thin. Then I started lashing out at people in uncharacteristic ways (sorry everyone! drinks on the house!) and I had this really palpable, eerie feeling that I just wasn’t feeling like myself.
It got really bad. Finally, by midweek I just reached a point of total exhaustion and I decided to check out for a bit: I texted a few key people that I was putting my phone on Do Not Disturb and to call me twice in case of emergency.
Here’s what I did next.
I went to a restaurant and sat at the bar. I ordered some delicious pasta and a glass of wine. And I read a book.
That’s it. That’s all I did.
No text notifications. No one calling me. I refused to check my e-mail. I didn’t look at Twitter. I just sat there out in the real world and had uninterrupted thoughts for a few hours.
I was alarmed at how good I felt after just a few hours of peace and quiet.
What our phones are doing to us
I don’t approach this subject lightly. I have built my entire career and livelihood on online community building and social media. I even owe my writing career at least in part to social media.
I felt like I needed to keep notifications on and check in on my social media accounts every day so I could stay abreast with what’s going on, just from a career-building perspective.
But my disenchantment with these platforms has been growing. And it turns out I’m not alone.
There was a really good article published by The Guardian last week about how even some of the key creators of social media innovations, such as the like button and swipe-to-refresh, have grown alarmed at the addictiveness of phones and the effect they’re having on us.
People seem to be waking up to the immense power the tech giants wield, the murky ethics they operate by, and the lack of thought and foresight given to unintended consequences of our new social media-dominated existence.
As a writer, I worry that we’re eroding our collective ability to concentrate enough to read books. Let alone write them…
Practical tips for distraction-free living
After blissful my night unplugging, I’ve taken some seemingly drastic, but in fact totally manageable, steps to unplug. (I have an iPhone, so these suggestions are going to be tailored to the Apple platform, but I’m sure there are analogs for Android.)
- Turn off all but the most crucial notifications. No, Netflix, I don’t need to know some random show or movie has been released. No, Weather Channel, I don’t need to know about some storm affecting some other part of the country. In fact, no no no to pretty much everyone period. Here are the only notifications I allow on the lock screen:
- Text messages, Instagram/Snapchat messages, and phone calls: I still want people to be able to reach me, though not instantaneously (more on that in a sec).
- NY Times alerts: I thought long and hard about this one, but I still want to know about breaking news.
- ‘Hamilton’ lottery reminder: I WILL WIN THIS YET.
- Keep your phone (and laptops/iPads) on “Do Not Disturb.” This means that you will not be pinged or buzzed for alerts, text messages, or anything else. Your phone will be blissfully silent. You will not feel that nagging buzz in your pocket as you’re walking down the street, and, better yet, you’ll stop feeling a phantom buzzing in your pocket as you’re walking down the street too. All your messages will still be there when you choose to check your lock screen or open your phone.
- Add key phone numbers to your “Favorites” list and allow calls from them when you’re in “Do Not Disturb.” Like many people, I don’t have a landline, and I want to be reachable in case of emergency or if my niece and nephew want to FaceTime. I put my family and girlfriend on my Favorites list and set Do Not Disturb to let those calls through so they can still reach me if they need to.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m still on my phone for much of the day. I’m still very much in communication with people, texting, sending Snaps, checking Twitter, all the rest.
But here’s the major difference: now I choose when to engage. If I’m concentrating on something, I don’t have a buzz or ping or alert needlessly interrupting my thoughts. When I’m having drinks with a friend, I’m not getting distracted by the buzzing in my pocket and wondering who’s texting me.
Now: I finally have room to think. I broke the Pavlovian response of pings and distraction and curiosity. I can already feel my brain adapting to this new peacefulness.
You are what you concentrate on
I’m old enough to remember a world without the Internet, and I embarked on my adult life without social media and smartphones. I feel fortunate, in some ways, to remember what that felt like.
I wouldn’t go back to a pre-smartphone world for anything, but it’s worth applying the brakes from time to time and carving out some space for yourself.
Our brains are not cut out for the way our phones are demanding our attention. We’re giving up our ability to concentrate and succumbing to an endless string of hollow instant gratifications.
I shudder to think about the lost creative productivity I gave up by being instantly accessible and letting myself grow unable to concentrate.
It’s time to take our lives back. Start with your notifications.
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Art: Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) by Henri Rousseau
Sorry to hear about the burn-out, Nathan. I too worry about loss of creativity and concentration due to smart phones (and not just my losses!). I also leave 4G turned off when on holiday: it’s surprising how distracting they can be even when you’re having a fantastic time in the real world!
Excellent post. I have not activated email or notifications on my phone, and I refuse to. Phone calls are bad enough, but I don’t take my phone into my home office every day. Some days I just leave it out in the kitchen. Those days I am writing. But I do take breaks, so I always check my phone for important messages during my lunch break. That’s the way it would be at an out-of-the-home 9-to-5 job. People wouldn’t be able to notify me to tell me they tried a new color of nail polish if I were working for someone else, so I don’t allow these interruptions when I’m working for myself.
I allot a certain amount of time on certain days for visiting blogs. I spend a little time every day reading Facebook notifications, and I try to post something or like something here and there. But I can’t spend two hours a day on Facebook and two hours a day blogging or visiting blogs, and two hours a day on other communications. Not if I also want to work. And I know people who have 9-to-5 jobs and manage to visit Facebook quite often, and they manage to check out quite a few blogs and even post on their own a couple times a week. I don’t know how they do it other than to say they have a more lenient boss than I do.
It’s good that you shut off your notifications. You need time to be you, and time to do your own work. And you can always use your lunch hour or a specific hour each day to devote to the rest of the world.
This is so well-said and good to hear. I can see how, once one is tied in, it could be very difficult to take one’s questioning of My Modes of Communication any deeper.
So my emphasis is on gratitude when I say that I have held out and happily refuse to own a cell phone. Email, Facebook (using News Feed Eradicator, to be sure) and Twitter, of course. An author website, certainly.
Far from preventing me from becoming a successful writer, this allows me to reach my daily word count, to maintain the ‘world of my own’ in which my best writing rises naturally to the surface, to, simply, read and think and write in peace and in the richness of uninterrupted time.
Sure, I was on the train and missed the initial email telling me I’d won a fiction award.. but they held it for me 🙂 and man, did I get a lot of good writing done on that train trip.
Totally hear you on this. It’s a great refresher after turning off everything during vacation and I did a blog on giving up my smartphone features for lent. Time to sign off and not get notified if you respond.
Thanks for this timely article, Nathan.
I’ve just got my first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy. I’m a late adopter of such things, deliberately. It IS very useful, but I’ve already set it up more or less the way you advise! I’m prone to completism and FOMO at the best of times, so I’m careful about feeding that particular monster.
Amen to my fellow commenters, particularly Anneliese Schultz about maintaining the ‘World Of Our Own’. It’s all too easy to think other people’s thoughts and even live other people’s lives.
Incidentally, we’ve just had a tropical storm here in Ireland, the ex-hurricane Ophelia, something we hardly ever get here. No tigers, though. ‘TIGERNADO’ wouldn’t make a very good movie title…
Great article — but what really interests me is why I’m seeing more and more articles like it these days, with this tone of surprise over the whole phenomenon. That this was a problem was absolutely obvious to me from the first year I started seeing people switching to smart phones — and even to a degree before that. I watched as friends and family went from normal, engaged human beings to people with their noses in their phones all the time, regardless of context. People who couldn’t sit through a meal at IHOP without checking their texts or making another move in one of their half-dozen ongoing games of words with friends. People who almost literally couldn’t stay completely engaged with their real surroundings or think two things in a row.
I observed this and I thought: 1) this happens to every person who gets one of these things, and 2) there’s no way I want to become like that because 3) if this happened to me my creative process would shut down completely.
So I never got one. I’d absolutely go phoneless if flip-phones stopped being a thing, too.
Anyway: I just wonder why the whole thing was so repulsive to me from the get-go but not, apparently, almost anyone else for as long as it’s taken to get to where we are.
James’ last thought is a very good question, though unfortunately pretty moot at this point. I don’t write science fiction (only climate fiction, which is more like future reality), but just flashed on the disturbing concept of skies and water supplies pumping citizens full of not just chemicals and biological agents but the virus of consumerism. Or did the latter already happen?
Thank goodness there is some re-thinking going on while we still abound in good readers, thoughtful writers and real people.
I’d say it’s only moot if you believe this can’t happen again with another new world-shaking product or service 🙂
John – I’d definitely go see STILL SAFE IN IRELAND 🙂
Luddite here when it comes to phones. I still have my ye olden flip phone, which means I actually use a cell phone for what it was originally intended for. I can text, but definitely not as fast as most people. I do plan on getting a smart phone in the near future to listen to radio shows/podcasts and the like. Very few people will have that particular number. No social media for that phone ’cause I still value my job.
The major plus to being a Luddite with my main phone is that I’m not emotionally attached to it (seen the damage done by that via my 16 1/2 year old daughter), so my writing hasn’t suffered one bit (it may come this winter ’cause the family will be home on the weekends, but I’ll just have to create a workaround).
I came to very similar conclusions this year. I have Do Not Disturb for evening/night/early morning. I deleted facebook & twitter off my phone entirely. I still use social media, but it’s on laptop only. And even though I care about supporting good causes, I also try to keep in mind that I don’t need to comment on everything that happens on the news or even the pub world. I am so much happier!
I was born in the 60’s and I would have loved smart phones in my youth. I would have been one of those who had to have everything and I would have been addicted like so many are today. It will be interesting to see what the world is like in a hundred years. I grew up in a time where being alone with your thoughts was the norm. Reading a book on a rainy day or playing pool with friends was an every day thing. We focused on one thing and not a hundred. Most people are not good at multi-tasking and that is what most people are doing every day. It’s no wonder we live in a grumpy world.
Great post, again, Mr. Former Agent Man!
Best,
T
Hi Nathan,
Great article. Distractions are something that we are grappling with today. Between our mobile apps, emails, WhatsApp messages, SMS messages, etc., there is always something trying to get our attention.
Before all these distractions, my distractions at the office were people entering my office every few minutes. If I wanted to get some real work done, I would have to stay home. But now I stay home, and my phone is just as bad!
That said, your post has some excellent advice. Like you said, we need to take our lives back. I put the “Do Not Disturb” option on my Samsung Galaxy when I remember to. It really works.
Cheers,
Hazim
Amen to all commenters, particularly Bryan Fagan on multi-tasking, which can so easily make us the proverbial Jacks of all trades and masters of none. And it’s not lost on me that we’re commenting on the blog of a veritable high priest of social media.
Bravo, Nathan, for rebelling against the tyranny of machines and sharing your results with us! Slavery to machines has long been predicted, but nobody guessed the machines would be so small and innocuous-seeming.