💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 165 captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:52:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-05-24)
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Hey bartender, how are things on your end? My day's been very busy at work. I've spent my entire time on meetings and I don't feel like I brought much value. I realized today how many notifications I get throughout the day. My phone keeps vibrating all the time and it makes it hard to focus. I get this anxiety when I stop looking at my phone for a while, what if I miss some important things?
Maybe the most annoying part is that this phone stays with me the whole time. Days, night, when I'm working or when I'm not. In a way, I never really disconnect. It feels wrong, but that's what I've been doing for a while. I'm too scared to stop looking it at it. Disconnecting feels hard.
Anyway, I'll take another beer, please!
In order to work I need to physically separate my device from me. After a an hour or two I retrieve it because it holds ancient knowledge of notifications of hours passed. Funnily enough, when I'm really engrossed in something, I'll forget my phone for stretches of 4 or 5 hours or more. Unfortunately, "engrossed" is not a word I'd use to describe myself at work.
If only there was a device that I could play Spotify from, and use Google Maps on, and text from, and occasionally browse the internet from, and use as an alarm, and todo-list from, and create reminders, and keep all the other useful and flexible functions, without being distracting.
On another note, I don't think I've gone to sleep nor woken up on time since I got my first smartphone in 2015. Could be a coincidence.
I've been there, and I've found that the only why to deal with it is with a firm "No FOMO" policy. I stop all apps from chiming and vibrating, and check for notifications at *my* convenience. I check in whenever I finish a task, or if I think a task will take longer than expected. I block out time in Outlook so people know not to try to drag me into meetings. I'm available at 9:00am in the morning, and cease to be available between 5:00pm and 6:00pm depending on whether I got to take an hour for lunch.
Once I'm off for the day, I turn my company-issued laptop and my phone OFF. If something comes up after hours, tough shit; I never agreed to be on-call, I get my work done in *less than* 40 hours a week (sometimes less than 10 hours a week), and I don't get paid nearly enough to have work intruding upon my private life at odd hours. If something comes up overnight, I'll deal with it in the morning because I make CRUD applications for state governments. Nobody is going to die if a bug in prod that shows up at zero dark thirty doesn't get fixed by nine the next day.
Especially if the bug in prod is a form field that doesn't look exactly the same in IE11 as it does in Chrome.