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How notifications support “normal work”

I love notifications because I can otherwise very easily get into super unhealthy “check-check-checking” obsessive behavior.

They need to be few and good but once they’re there, they help me so much.

Calm notifications

There is this whole “deep work” productivity culture obsession with hating on notifications, and when I do hyperfocus I often turn notifications off. That needs to be easy to do, and I do that all the time.

But there is a level of focus just before that depth, let’s call it “normal work”. If deep work is twenty thousand leagues under the sea, this is nineteen leagues down. Figuratively speaking.

For me, “normal work” it’s just as valuable, maybe even more valuable since it’s not as obsessive and not as neglectful of my well-being as a whole, and I can’t get there if I’m in check-check-checking hell.

Supporting “normal work” isn’t in opposition of deep work, since it’s rare for me to get to the hyperfocus deep place if I can’t even get to the “normal work” levels of depth, unless I get nerd-sniped or otherwise driven by the latest and loudest in my head. When I’m in check-check-checking hell, I have a hard time doing normal work, or doing stuff I’ve chosen to do.

Even normal things like relaxing with a book or making a painting gets hard. Notifications can help me let go of things because I know it’s taken care of, I know it’s being minded.

xkcd: Nerd Sniping

Choosing SOFA

I’m in a good place when I have notifications that I can trust get through, I can super easily toggle on and off with a single keystroke and that get turned off automatically at night will still letting emergency calls through.

Follow-ups

Roger writes in, saying:

There’s also shallow response versus deep response, for me at least. I can look at a short message and decide to ignore it without dropping out of flow, but a phone call or a conversation longer than a few words will destroy it every time.

Oh, that is interesting!

I guess when I’m in super hyper focus, I can sometimes neglect “hey there’s a new message for you” (even though I’d rather just have muted it and check later) but in I’m the deepest depth I can even get back into it after a call. Although either way it does take time to get out of and into flow.

The problem area for me isn’t as much the hyperfocus deep work as it is “normal work”, which I can’t even get into if I’m check-check-checking, and if I get interrupted doing that, I’m fine with that because socializing with people is more fun and important than the “normal work” (or I would’ve muted).

My rule for phones at the D&D table is “no texting or chatting or using the internet, but you can take calls, so tell your fam to call you if there’s an emergency”.

eapl.mx chimes in:

IMO the healthy part would be not being interrupted (so often) and not being obsessed (that much). If we were unable to do that, and had to pick one, I’d choose trying to manage my FOMO, and not being interrupted by external forces, but my own mind.

After trying both for several years, I’ve found that I must choose the other option.

In some zen monestaries they have a pretty tight schedule 365/7/24. They work when it’s time to work, eat when it’s time to eat, sit when it’s time to sit. They aren’t left to their own minds whims on when to check messages. Same in the olden days; the post arrived when the post arrived. The phone called when the phone called. The toll on my mind to manage my own FOMO is beyond the weight of history. I think people underestimate just how lost and sick my sprawl-brain is. I think many people have it even worse than me, judging from how many phones I see on the subway, but I’ve got it pretty bad.

But I wanna reiterate that I want easy toggling and muting of notifications. I know the value of working uninterrupted and that’s when I mute ‘em.

Thirdly, this is why I’m talking about “normal work”, not “deep work”. Sometimes, I wanna read a book or working on a sketch in a mode of “I wouldn’t mind it if such-and-such wanted to hang out right now”. It’s the difference between painting in a locked room to deeply concentrate (notifications muted) or sitting with a sketchpad in the living room as friends and fam are talking (notifications on). I do not want to live in only the former of those two modes. I was pretty much all offline all the time before 2020 but now I’ve become terribly isolated and lonely. Shutting it all off in order to “only work” is a dreadful proposition. I want normal work that’s not in the “nothing else matters” vein, it’s in the “enh I’ll sketch on this idea for a while and if it’s really good and I get really into it, I can mute and if it’s not and something else that’s cool comes along, that’d be a welcome break”. Like, is reading a novel really more important than being reachable by my best friends and my wives and husbands? Sometimes it is, and that’s when I’d mute. Usually it’s not, and that’s when the check-check-checking FOMO-driven monkey-mindset keeps me from relaxing with the book. Thanks to notifications, I can read the book relaxed and put the rest of the world out of mind, knowing it can reach me if something cool happens.

Four scenarios

I often like looking at four scenarios (nerds will recognize that from the matrix of two binary axes). In this case:

I check and there usually are messages when I check

In this scenario, I don’t really gain anything by being notified. Notifications would even cost me time, since they make me go deal with a message sooner rather than working for a few minutes more and then batching up the messages the next time I do check.

This is the situation I’m in with non-personal stuff like newsletters andAntenna and other feeds. I check ‘em, there’s a bunch, I can deal with the most interesting ones. If there are more than I can read that’s fine too. I don’t have a will of iron even with these ones, but I’ve set my cron jobs so that these get batched up by the computer making it pointless for me to go check too often.

But for more vital stuff, if I get enough messages that there are messages (only talking about real, personal, friends-and-fam messages, or there-is-a-problem messages) everytime I check, I’m such a monkey-minded dopamine junkie that I’m gonna slowly and involuntarily and mindlessly and obsessively gradually increase my checking frequency so that I get to a place where:

I check and there usually are no messages when I check

This means that the check was pointless. A waste of time. The whole act of stopping work and going over to check and then halfway back to work stopping and going back to check again, and then trying to get back to work but I just need to check one more time etc etc. Not into it!

That’s the hell I’m in most of the time and that notifications can cure.

I get notified and messages are rare

This is great! I can get into my work, get pretty deep into it and unless something happens that I really care about I can let all that stuff be out-of-sight–out-of-mind.

I get notified and messages are torrentially common

If this is how I really feel about messages, it means that one of three things is going on.

Either what I’m working on really is more interesting than the messages, in which case it’s time to mute them.

Or, there is A Situation going on, which might mean I have to either deal with the messages or go take a super serious break away from it all. Like that one time my boyfriend got in the newspapers for busting ghosts and the media couldn’t get to him so they started going after me and my phone (I’ve changed my number since then) kept blowing up.

Or, I have too low of a threshold for what kind of messages I subscribe to and it’s time to make cuts, either to the messages (move some of ‘em to a batched workflow, maybe) or to my worklife.

“Little and often” vs “only once”