Daniel Kramer

I've been noticing myself getting distracted from whatever I'm trying to focus on, by notifications that have been getting more and more frequent.

It's gotten to be so much of a problem that I decided to put my foot down and launch a concerted effort to reclaim my attention. And I found it useful to break that effort down into two big parts - internal and external environment.

The internal part is centered around mindfulness, and I'll recommend you explore that idea with psychologists or other people that have thought about this way more than I have.

For brevity lets focus on bringing order to the external environment, and more specifically a single part of that, notifications.

What Makes a Better Notification?

My goal is to receive only Good notifications, without worrying about if I'm missing anything truly important. Let's find out if that is even possible...

I've been thinking a lot about what actually makes up a good notification and for me it's come down to a combination of three things:

• Directed Towards Me: I’m one of the express intended recipients of the notification.
• Time-sensitive: It relates to something happening now, urgently (at least, within the next day).
• Requires an Action: I need to act or change my plans or behavior upon reciept.

To me, notifications with these three qualities outweigh the cost of distraction, and are “whitelisted.” But I don't think there needs to be a notification if any single one of these qualifications are missing. Everything else can be a todo task, note, email, newsfeed, whatever - that I can check on my own volition if and when I want.

Think about the types of notifications you get. For a while, I was getting notified of EMAILS! If I'm being real with myself I've never gotten an email with shattering consequences if I didn't respond within 24 hours. Imagine living even a generation or two ago and needing to know instantly about 90% of what you're getting notifications about, and blacklist notifications accordingly.

Objections, and Making the Edge Cases Work

I've gotten pretty far implementing this in my own life, so I asked people if this would work for them too, and here are two objections that came up:

1. The most common one was having to think about setting time aside to check places that they'd otherwise get prompted to go to with their notifications: The email, the massive group chat, and the youtube subscribtions feed were all examples. If that's a concern of yours then I'd suggest setting up your own reminder if you absolutely need to, but If you're like me, you're already in the habit of checking these places too much, not too little.
2. The other objection was: What about those one-off texts organizing an spontaneous get together? As far as I know, that's an unsolved problem. Can it be fixed? I think so:

That’s part of my inspiration for building an app where the sole purpose is people can intentionally notify each other, only about the types of things the receiver thinks is important, and that would otherwise get lost in large group chats or email threads. And from there we can engage with them on our own terms.

Final Notes

Feel free to contact me to let me know your setup, especially if this wouldn't work for you (I would love to hear from doctors and nurses with pagers or security guards on night shift)! Also, shoutout to the book Deep Work which goes way into depth on habits to not need notifications so often anyways. I hope this short article was at least just a starting spark in your favor in the lifelong war against mental and digital clutter. Thanks for reading!