10 ms·

The tyranny of messaging and notifications

90 points by Osiris30 10y ago

kneel 10y ago
My personal remedy If I ever get a notification on my phone that isn't a human trying to interact with me I immediately disable the notification and/or app. With email I often (daily) unsubscribe from whatever impersonal newsletter shows up in my inbox. I save my attention for people who take time to message me personally. Red badges on my phone are irritating.
- hrnnnnnn 10y ago
  Same here. It takes a few seconds every time it happens and saves you a bunch of wasted attention in the future.
- slazaro 10y ago
  I go even further with email: Every email I get, if getting instantly notified by it and interrupting me is not necessary, I later add a filter for archiving it. Then, my inbox is for things to deal with soon, archived mails are for other stuff. Now I only get notified by actual important stuff, or unknown senders.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    A whitelist, blacklist, greylist solution works well for this, possibly with the addition of a "backlist". Whitelist: Inbox. High-priority senders. Blacklist: Trash / treat as spam. One model is to add an address to your blacklist as you unsubscribe it. Any further messages feed spam filters. Greylist: Previously unseen. This goes to a bucket for sorting through. You can apply more heuristics to this (keyword / sender / references, etc.). Backlist: Known low-priority senders. It basically goes into the "deal with it later" file. Anything that's specifically sortable (e.g., technical mailing lists) goes to its own space. My fundamental problem is that few tools offer the means to do this type of sorting. Gmail's filters are, the more I use them, increasingly pathetic. Procmail is powerful -- I've built up highly extensive filters with it over decades. But it's also a pain to use, largely unmaintained and unmaintainable. It lacks a simple means to, say, point at a list of addresses and say "good, bad, or ugly". Adding addresses specifically to rulesets is somewhat tedious. And as with other cleint-side tools, it doesn't work with IMAP services in a reasonable way (you can treat IMAP as POP, but then you lose filtering for all other clients accessing the server). There are some other tools -- there's a ... Perl? based tool, Mail<mumble>, which is cleaner than procmail but also different and I've not wrapped my head around it. There are IMAP-based tools, but I've had little luck with them. Email's generally simply getting crufty. I've resisted calling for a replacement for a while, but increasingly, it's time.
- reledi 10y ago
  I used to do this but endlessly pruning distractions itself became an unwanted distraction. My current approach is to do nothing and only act on important notifications/emails. It's not Inbox Zero, it's Inbox Zero Fucks Given.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  I went through a similar process a month ago. Every time some notification popped up, if it wasn't interesting, I either deleted the app itself (when I realized I don't even use it - e.g. Instagram), disabled push notifications for it (countless of e.g. Facebook groups) or just muted it on my Pebble (so that it shows up on the phone, but doesn't vibrate my wrist). At the same time, I begun aggressively unsubscribing from every single e-mail newsletter that came to my inbox that I didn't find immediately useful. Few days of that process, and suddenly my mail and notification load dropped to like 10% of its usual value, and I realized how much more relaxed and focused I am during the day.
droopyEyelids 10y ago
I believe this may only be a problem for certain generations. People raised to be "native" with technology have several filters. First, they realize managing notifications is highly important. They ruthlessly unsubscribe, block and restrict. Second, different uses are compartmentalized between different services and those services are given different abilites to penetrate your attention. You don't get work snapchats. Slack has a snooze mode and you don't set up your mobile notification center to keep them around until dismissed. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they aren't compelled to jump at every attempt to contact them. Messages can go unanswered, and life goes on.
- johnchristopher 10y ago
  Damn kids know how to work the VCR ! Seriously, many digital natives are as clueless as anyone else regarding their smartphone and, more broadly, regarding computers as well.
  - sheraz 10y ago
    Yup. Step outside your personal and professional tech-bubbles, and it becomes apparent how many people young and old know almost nothing about their phones and computers. Pareto's rule at work -- 80% of smartphone users only use 20% of the features. And unfortunately, those features to tweak and control notifications live in the often unused 80% of the phone.
- ludamad 10y ago
  I'd like to see some PSAs for this stuff in school, as an extension of trying to teach kids good habits. Something like trying to do tasks dictated from a stream of notifications, mixed with noise, exploring the stream's effect on attention.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Good luck. Multi-tasking is still a respected quality despite being detrimental to productivity.
- 10y ago
cel1ne 10y ago
There's a gesture I often find myself doing while working: 1. Turn phone silent and flip it screen-down 2. Quit Mail.app 3. Zoom in (MacOS) about 10%, so I can't see the border of my screen, with the menubar, the notifications in the dock etc.
- Razengan 10y ago
  Re: 3, you can just hide the menubar and the dock. They only show up on mouseover and it's actually quite pleasant as well as frees up some screen real estate on laptops.
  - amelius 10y ago
    But if the menubar/dock don't show notifications in that case, then that is a bug, it seems. Not all people will think that is a feature.
    - Swizec 10y ago
      You can explicitly disable notifications. It's very nice. I just wish it extended to browser notifications. They're increasngly becoming a problem.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Alt-click the little ... list icon? ... in the menu bar and it will start no-notifications mode
  - krzrak 10y ago
    > Alt-click the little ... list icon? ... in the menu bar and it will start no-notifications mode Whoa, awesome! It's one of the features they tell nobody about...
    - lloeki 10y ago
      You can also scroll up one of the two panes in the today/notifications sidebar to access the do not disturb switch. Obscure at best.
EGreg 10y ago
Ideally, notifications should only be for things you are interested in, ie things that accumulate a high enough score based on your filters. Filters should include the subjects and the label of the contacts that posted it.
franciscop 10y ago
> "Notifications are supposed to save you time" That's a big premise that I didn't know nor I believe it's true. Notifications are supposed to tell you when something happens, which is the opposite of saving you time.
- adiabatty 10y ago
  Beats manually polling apps yourself to see if there's anything new in each.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    Not so sure, half of the apps that notify me I would have never polled them (maps, dictionaries, studying apps). The other half are muted so I can poll them when I'm not in the middle of a focused task as that would break my concentration and I'd need a while to regain it. The only two I keep active and not blocked are slack and Inbox, both having low traffic for me, because I use them for important work-related stuff.
Aoyagi 10y ago
Orrrr what about selfcontrol? The only notifications I get on my smartphone are system notifications, SMS, and Telegram (and that's only when I intentionally go online, otherwise I leave the device off-line).
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  "Self control" costs mental energy, it imposes cognitive load. If you want to go on a diet, don't exercise self control by not opening the bag of Oreos. Throw the fucking bag of Oreos and don't buy any more. Practicing diet hygiene by only buying healthy foods is far easier than trying to avoid eating crap that's in front of your face. Practicing security hygiene by eliminating situations which give rise to security risks (e.g., buffer overflows, and OpenBSD's rewrite of core libraries to that effect) is far easier than trying to remember to check your string lengths on every operation. Practicing mental hygiene by eliminating the very possibility of interruption is vastly easier than reminding yourself to resist Every. Single. Fucking. Temptation. That. Comes. Along. See Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, first chapter or so. Covers this well.
  - Aoyagi 10y ago
    I'm aware of that. Hence what I said earlier. I don't get, for example, Facebook notifications because I don't have Facebook on my device. Or anything else that I know could cause "tyranny of notifications". I mean, it basically is not buying the Oreos. But unlike Oreos, applications on modern smartphones are much easier to obtain and a lot of people still believe something along the lines of "more 'apps', more productivity", so you have to pull out arguably more effort. Regardless, people are to blame themselves in both cases.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Thinking back over my experience: Tablet, wifi only, no phone. Very few social aps, and reducing those. Ditto messaging. Google's crap is installed and cannot be removed, though some apps can be disabled. I'm routinely queried by websites whether I'll allow location data. No, I won't. That's disabled at device level, and I should never be queried for that. Ever. Somehow, Google Hangouts got itself convinced I was logged in. I'm not. Got some random connects. Backed out and blocked the shit out of as much of that as possible. Google Maps pestered me for location information every fucking time. No, that's not how I used this app, and I'm not going to provide it. Finally uninstalled/disabled the app. YouTube running pre-roll ads. Finally disabled that. Google Play Store wanted to give me games. I walked through disabling and ripping out as much of that as I could. I think some of it's been walked back. Google Chrome browser: autoplay video, audio, popover crap, and no adblock. I'm about ready to uninstall / block it. Various other nags, including "application optimisation" from Android itself. Really, just fucking figure out how to fucking optimise yourself and leave me the fuck out of it. I use this device for research, some writing, and some online posting. That's pretty much it. It still bugs the fucking crap out of me and is shit for what it does. I'm relatively convinced this is the last full-on Android device I'll buy. It's been semi-useful, but frustrating as fuck, a privacy nightmare, the tablet itself is locked down pretty hard, and the keyboard-case from Logitech was defective from purchase and now Logitech are refusing to replace it with same -- I'd need a case, stand, and keyboard to replace it, they're offering at best a keyboard. Lawsuit and consumer complaint time. Pretty much a clusterfuck all around.
kirkdouglas 10y ago
Currently I have 6 messaging apps and no hope that I can reduce their number, because I text with different groups of people. The only way to manage this is through self-discipline - I don't check phone too often. But situation is bad, since these 6 apps doing exactly the same job and there's no interoperability between them.
tonylemesmer 10y ago
My personal remedy Yesterday I fired up a Nokia 6310i as my main phone and put my SIM card in it. I setup a Zapier zap to SMS me when I get an important email (as defined by Gmail filters). I've now realised how FEW important emails I get but how often I used to get mail notifications (a lot). Now my data apps on the smartphone only have access to Wi-Fi resulting in far fewer notifications. My notification settings are already quite restrictive on all apps. Notifications and messaging are governed by a 2-way awareness. If people know you are contactable (e.g. by watching the little blue tick in Whatsapp) then they'll contact you more and spend more time checking to see if you've read their message. If they know it takes 10 hours for you to respond then can choose their channel more appropriately. I've not yet had to use Google Maps for navigation (requires data) - lets see how that turns out on my next long distance car trip. Pain in the arse that I am now carrying 2 phones, but lets see how my experiment pans out. Might be a total car crash (figuratively speaking)
- emilburzo 10y ago
  Why not just uninstall everything except Gmail from your phone? Bonus: your battery will last longer. I like to keep the two worlds apart, if I'm at my computer I am reachable by any means of digital communication. If I'm not, I only have gmail on my phone (with a lot of filters so that only time sensitive stuff reaches my actual inbox, the rest is filed away under labels for later review). I tried having some chat apps on my phone, but I had way too many interruptions from whatever I was doing, and I wouldn't have been able to respond with a coherent message anyway. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
  - tonylemesmer 10y ago
    I guess its because for chatting with my wife (when we're in separate places I might add!), friends and occasional work project stuff Whatsapp is great to have. Email is clunky and sending attachments for ephemeral but important stuff is inelegant. Twitter DMs are no better than SMS except that you can compartmentalise those users by not giving them your phone number. I've never had Facebook messenger or the Facebook app and I've recently deleted my Facebook account entirely. SMS, email, Twitter DMs, Whatsapp and telephone are my limit but trying to pare this down further without losing some of the utility I infrequently enjoy. In the mid 90s I was in my late teens when I got my first candybar phone. The sparkly lights of smartphones for the last 10 years have now lost their shine. I guess I'm nostalgic for the good old days of SMS and phone only whilst I'm away from the office.
yann63 10y ago
This is because most apps designers want you to spend time in their apps. Instead they should focus do design for time well spent: http://timewellspent.io/ http://timewellspent.io/ Great article published here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232
mafribe 10y ago
I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. The smartphone is the messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication. Whether you get 7 notifications from different 7 apps or 7 notifications from 1 app should not make a difference from the point of view of attention spent, focus lost, time wasted. The following communication pattern has emerged for me, without any design on my side: Snap: frivolous and fun Whatsapp: family, European friends, the Toyota/VW of messaging LINE: Asian friends Skype: high priority work stuff Email: low priority work stuff Insta: friends boasting about their life ;) In other words, different apps function as a way of categorising messages. I find this siloing convenient. Siloing reduces the risk of sharing the wrong kind of message with the wrong kind of person, which has been a great problem with unified messaging systems (e.g. Facebook, or Google's centralisation of all accounts when they introduced G+). As these different messaging systems are (simplifying a bit) fungible, and it is near frictionless to switch between them on a modern smartphone, the phone (it's number or IMEI) is the new dominant form of electronically addressable social identity. This should worry the Facebooks, Snapchats, Whatsapps etc of this world, because the network effects which is the driving force behind their business models has been weakened to a considerable degree. In summary: I welcome the widespread use of heterogeneous messaging and notification apps on the phone, it makes my life easier and safer.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  >I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. Your point isn't unreasonable, it's just that may of these services doesn't have the same filtering capabilities that something like has. Snapchat and Instagram, yeah that pretty safe to ignore, but many simply can't. They're "flashing" to get your attention, the systems are designed that way. Sure, maybe people should "just have more willpower", most of us don't though. I noticed that you left out things like Facebook and Twitter, where it's hard to know if it going to be important, before you check. Personally, my rules for communicating: Email - It might be important, but not time critical in any way. My preferred form of communicating in general. SMS - I might get back to you, I may not. SMS is for "just letting you know" sort of things. Phone call - It's important, or you need feedback/have questions. I'm not going to waste time texting or emailing back and forth if it can be resolved by a 2 minute phone call. Everything else is: Don't expect me to react to this. I still feel that with all newer forms of communicating it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email.
jasonkester 10y ago
It amazes me that neither iOS nor Android have an option for "Disallow all notifications from all apps" or "Opt out of notifications when installing apps". Every app I install immediately starts blasting me with notifications, and I have to go in and turn it off for that specific app. It makes no sense. My phone should be allowed to make noise if and only if a phone call is coming in from somebody I know. I don't mind if it shows a count of email messages on the lock screen, so long as it doesn't attempt to distract me from what I'm doing to point them out. And that's it. No other notifications of any form. I see people with things like Slack and IM binging away at them all day long, and I just can't fathom how they get anything done. It just needs turning off.
- saurik 10y ago
  Why even allow phone calls to interrupt you? I am serious: the world is a much more relaxing place when the only moments something can interrupt you are the ones where you purposely decide "this is a good moment" and look at your phone to see if anything happened. I have been operating without audible or tactile notifications of any form now for years. The only time my phone makes noise is when I have an alarm set to wake me up in the morning.
  - morgante 10y ago
    Almost the only people who have my phone number (ie. not Google Voice) are my parents. If they're calling me, it's usually for a good and urgent reason. Also, PagerDuty is set up to call me. If a site I'm responsible or is down, that's something I want to know immediately.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      In the case of PagerDuty, my exceptionally strong preference is for a physical pager, which is passed, fully charged, to the next person on call. If the person passing off the pager hasn't charged it, they hold the pager until it is. Why? Because if I don't have the pager, I know I don't have shit to worry about. I swear to the gods, that literally nearly killed me. The psychological pressure, over years, of being on-call or 2nd on call (small teams suck) bears down. The moreso with technical debt, buggy sites, and verbal lore recovery methods (trust me, I document the motherloving hell out of everything, but there are bits that are buried very, very deep). If you're contracting services or running your own sites, a separate pager still offers benefits. Again, it can be handed off, and you know when it goes off there's trouble (yes, you can also program different ring/dial tones, etc.). I'm also impressed by the robustness, range, and battery life of physical pagers, another benefit.
pepijndevos 10y ago
BlackBerry's Hub is your friend.
- richardboegli 10y ago
  Or potentially Samsung Focus http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-Unpacked-event-coming-August-2.167755.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-Unpa... This is why I want to buy Note 7.... Samsung could include an app called the Samsung Focus for combining email, instant messaging, and calendar into one convenient window.
ekzy 10y ago
One of the "big solution": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88Ya9krtBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88Ya9krtBk
mxuribe 10y ago
I wish I could upvote this more than once...this article - and associated - issue struck such a chord with me!
exodust 10y ago
Notifications can be turned off per app or completely. The author complains about Starbucks notifications as if he is helpless to stop the onslaught. Just take control of your devices rather than leaving everything at default settings. Go on... embark on an adventurous mission into the settings and flick a few switches like a boss.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I hear Mossberg's message loud and clear, agree with virtually all of it, and hate the present world. He's got the journalistic and tech cred to be heard, and I very much hope he is. A unified, centralised, USER-CENTRIC message-and-notifications-control interface would be wonderful. Android absolutely isn't it. iOS, from comments here, might have some advantages. I've hurled my phone and carry a WiFi-only tablet. Mostly I've the luxury of not requiring to be in instant and continuous contact, and it's a godsend. Looking over Mossberg's data, I'm impressed by his 350 emails/day stat. It's quite close to what Stephen Wolfram reported in his quantified self reveal, and hints strongly at an upper-bound to the number of interruptions and notifications people can tolerate. If Mossberg devotes 2 hours daily to email, he's dealing with three a minute -- one every 20 seconds. If he's devoting 4 minutes to each message, he's spending 23 hours 20 minutes of every day processing email. Clearly, at that volume, there are limits to either how many messages can be processed, how much processing can be given each, or both. Wolfram's observation was that not responding immediately to email tended to be a win for him, as many problems self-resolved. Another hacker trick has long been to download and process entire email spools. RMS does this, @kragen on HN does (or did) as well -- literally pulling an mbox file, and going through and responding to it, with a batch-send later. Marissa Meyer of Yahoo is reported to use Mutt to blast through hundreds of emails in a late-night, multi-hour session, something I've done (or did, when my email spool was still tractable). http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/ http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/
glasz 10y ago
i'm quite amazed by how much of a problem this is for people. they seem to be subscribed to all kinds of useless crap and/or unable to just configure their shit properly. the most i get are 3 notifications per week. 90% of them are crap which i could even disable. and even then i mostly ignore them. what happened to human's ability to ignore things? notifications are not like robots chasing you.
tkjef 10y ago
I made a pretty nice Android app to manage your email & text notifications. Check it out here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono.emailnew&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono... Let me know if you have any questions. Been working great for me for 4+ years.

90 points by Osiris30 10y ago

kneel 10y ago

My personal remedy If I ever get a notification on my phone that isn't a human trying to interact with me I immediately disable the notification and/or app. With email I often (daily) unsubscribe from whatever impersonal newsletter shows up in my inbox. I save my attention for people who take time to message me personally. Red badges on my phone are irritating.

hrnnnnnn 10y ago
Same here. It takes a few seconds every time it happens and saves you a bunch of wasted attention in the future.
slazaro 10y ago
I go even further with email: Every email I get, if getting instantly notified by it and interrupting me is not necessary, I later add a filter for archiving it. Then, my inbox is for things to deal with soon, archived mails are for other stuff. Now I only get notified by actual important stuff, or unknown senders.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  A whitelist, blacklist, greylist solution works well for this, possibly with the addition of a "backlist". Whitelist: Inbox. High-priority senders. Blacklist: Trash / treat as spam. One model is to add an address to your blacklist as you unsubscribe it. Any further messages feed spam filters. Greylist: Previously unseen. This goes to a bucket for sorting through. You can apply more heuristics to this (keyword / sender / references, etc.). Backlist: Known low-priority senders. It basically goes into the "deal with it later" file. Anything that's specifically sortable (e.g., technical mailing lists) goes to its own space. My fundamental problem is that few tools offer the means to do this type of sorting. Gmail's filters are, the more I use them, increasingly pathetic. Procmail is powerful -- I've built up highly extensive filters with it over decades. But it's also a pain to use, largely unmaintained and unmaintainable. It lacks a simple means to, say, point at a list of addresses and say "good, bad, or ugly". Adding addresses specifically to rulesets is somewhat tedious. And as with other cleint-side tools, it doesn't work with IMAP services in a reasonable way (you can treat IMAP as POP, but then you lose filtering for all other clients accessing the server). There are some other tools -- there's a ... Perl? based tool, Mail<mumble>, which is cleaner than procmail but also different and I've not wrapped my head around it. There are IMAP-based tools, but I've had little luck with them. Email's generally simply getting crufty. I've resisted calling for a replacement for a while, but increasingly, it's time.
reledi 10y ago
I used to do this but endlessly pruning distractions itself became an unwanted distraction. My current approach is to do nothing and only act on important notifications/emails. It's not Inbox Zero, it's Inbox Zero Fucks Given.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I went through a similar process a month ago. Every time some notification popped up, if it wasn't interesting, I either deleted the app itself (when I realized I don't even use it - e.g. Instagram), disabled push notifications for it (countless of e.g. Facebook groups) or just muted it on my Pebble (so that it shows up on the phone, but doesn't vibrate my wrist). At the same time, I begun aggressively unsubscribing from every single e-mail newsletter that came to my inbox that I didn't find immediately useful. Few days of that process, and suddenly my mail and notification load dropped to like 10% of its usual value, and I realized how much more relaxed and focused I am during the day.

droopyEyelids 10y ago

I believe this may only be a problem for certain generations. People raised to be "native" with technology have several filters. First, they realize managing notifications is highly important. They ruthlessly unsubscribe, block and restrict. Second, different uses are compartmentalized between different services and those services are given different abilites to penetrate your attention. You don't get work snapchats. Slack has a snooze mode and you don't set up your mobile notification center to keep them around until dismissed. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they aren't compelled to jump at every attempt to contact them. Messages can go unanswered, and life goes on.

johnchristopher 10y ago
Damn kids know how to work the VCR ! Seriously, many digital natives are as clueless as anyone else regarding their smartphone and, more broadly, regarding computers as well.
- sheraz 10y ago
  Yup. Step outside your personal and professional tech-bubbles, and it becomes apparent how many people young and old know almost nothing about their phones and computers. Pareto's rule at work -- 80% of smartphone users only use 20% of the features. And unfortunately, those features to tweak and control notifications live in the often unused 80% of the phone.
ludamad 10y ago
I'd like to see some PSAs for this stuff in school, as an extension of trying to teach kids good habits. Something like trying to do tasks dictated from a stream of notifications, mixed with noise, exploring the stream's effect on attention.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Good luck. Multi-tasking is still a respected quality despite being detrimental to productivity.
10y ago

cel1ne 10y ago

There's a gesture I often find myself doing while working: 1. Turn phone silent and flip it screen-down 2. Quit Mail.app 3. Zoom in (MacOS) about 10%, so I can't see the border of my screen, with the menubar, the notifications in the dock etc.

Razengan 10y ago
Re: 3, you can just hide the menubar and the dock. They only show up on mouseover and it's actually quite pleasant as well as frees up some screen real estate on laptops.
- amelius 10y ago
  But if the menubar/dock don't show notifications in that case, then that is a bug, it seems. Not all people will think that is a feature.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    You can explicitly disable notifications. It's very nice. I just wish it extended to browser notifications. They're increasngly becoming a problem.
wingerlang 10y ago
Alt-click the little ... list icon? ... in the menu bar and it will start no-notifications mode
- krzrak 10y ago
  > Alt-click the little ... list icon? ... in the menu bar and it will start no-notifications mode Whoa, awesome! It's one of the features they tell nobody about...
  - lloeki 10y ago
    You can also scroll up one of the two panes in the today/notifications sidebar to access the do not disturb switch. Obscure at best.

EGreg 10y ago

Ideally, notifications should only be for things you are interested in, ie things that accumulate a high enough score based on your filters. Filters should include the subjects and the label of the contacts that posted it.

franciscop 10y ago

> "Notifications are supposed to save you time" That's a big premise that I didn't know nor I believe it's true. Notifications are supposed to tell you when something happens, which is the opposite of saving you time.

adiabatty 10y ago
Beats manually polling apps yourself to see if there's anything new in each.
- franciscop 10y ago
  Not so sure, half of the apps that notify me I would have never polled them (maps, dictionaries, studying apps). The other half are muted so I can poll them when I'm not in the middle of a focused task as that would break my concentration and I'd need a while to regain it. The only two I keep active and not blocked are slack and Inbox, both having low traffic for me, because I use them for important work-related stuff.

Aoyagi 10y ago

Orrrr what about selfcontrol? The only notifications I get on my smartphone are system notifications, SMS, and Telegram (and that's only when I intentionally go online, otherwise I leave the device off-line).

dredmorbius 10y ago
"Self control" costs mental energy, it imposes cognitive load. If you want to go on a diet, don't exercise self control by not opening the bag of Oreos. Throw the fucking bag of Oreos and don't buy any more. Practicing diet hygiene by only buying healthy foods is far easier than trying to avoid eating crap that's in front of your face. Practicing security hygiene by eliminating situations which give rise to security risks (e.g., buffer overflows, and OpenBSD's rewrite of core libraries to that effect) is far easier than trying to remember to check your string lengths on every operation. Practicing mental hygiene by eliminating the very possibility of interruption is vastly easier than reminding yourself to resist Every. Single. Fucking. Temptation. That. Comes. Along. See Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, first chapter or so. Covers this well.
- Aoyagi 10y ago
  I'm aware of that. Hence what I said earlier. I don't get, for example, Facebook notifications because I don't have Facebook on my device. Or anything else that I know could cause "tyranny of notifications". I mean, it basically is not buying the Oreos. But unlike Oreos, applications on modern smartphones are much easier to obtain and a lot of people still believe something along the lines of "more 'apps', more productivity", so you have to pull out arguably more effort. Regardless, people are to blame themselves in both cases.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Thinking back over my experience: Tablet, wifi only, no phone. Very few social aps, and reducing those. Ditto messaging. Google's crap is installed and cannot be removed, though some apps can be disabled. I'm routinely queried by websites whether I'll allow location data. No, I won't. That's disabled at device level, and I should never be queried for that. Ever. Somehow, Google Hangouts got itself convinced I was logged in. I'm not. Got some random connects. Backed out and blocked the shit out of as much of that as possible. Google Maps pestered me for location information every fucking time. No, that's not how I used this app, and I'm not going to provide it. Finally uninstalled/disabled the app. YouTube running pre-roll ads. Finally disabled that. Google Play Store wanted to give me games. I walked through disabling and ripping out as much of that as I could. I think some of it's been walked back. Google Chrome browser: autoplay video, audio, popover crap, and no adblock. I'm about ready to uninstall / block it. Various other nags, including "application optimisation" from Android itself. Really, just fucking figure out how to fucking optimise yourself and leave me the fuck out of it. I use this device for research, some writing, and some online posting. That's pretty much it. It still bugs the fucking crap out of me and is shit for what it does. I'm relatively convinced this is the last full-on Android device I'll buy. It's been semi-useful, but frustrating as fuck, a privacy nightmare, the tablet itself is locked down pretty hard, and the keyboard-case from Logitech was defective from purchase and now Logitech are refusing to replace it with same -- I'd need a case, stand, and keyboard to replace it, they're offering at best a keyboard. Lawsuit and consumer complaint time. Pretty much a clusterfuck all around.

kirkdouglas 10y ago

Currently I have 6 messaging apps and no hope that I can reduce their number, because I text with different groups of people. The only way to manage this is through self-discipline - I don't check phone too often. But situation is bad, since these 6 apps doing exactly the same job and there's no interoperability between them.

tonylemesmer 10y ago

My personal remedy Yesterday I fired up a Nokia 6310i as my main phone and put my SIM card in it. I setup a Zapier zap to SMS me when I get an important email (as defined by Gmail filters). I've now realised how FEW important emails I get but how often I used to get mail notifications (a lot). Now my data apps on the smartphone only have access to Wi-Fi resulting in far fewer notifications. My notification settings are already quite restrictive on all apps. Notifications and messaging are governed by a 2-way awareness. If people know you are contactable (e.g. by watching the little blue tick in Whatsapp) then they'll contact you more and spend more time checking to see if you've read their message. If they know it takes 10 hours for you to respond then can choose their channel more appropriately. I've not yet had to use Google Maps for navigation (requires data) - lets see how that turns out on my next long distance car trip. Pain in the arse that I am now carrying 2 phones, but lets see how my experiment pans out. Might be a total car crash (figuratively speaking)

emilburzo 10y ago
Why not just uninstall everything except Gmail from your phone? Bonus: your battery will last longer. I like to keep the two worlds apart, if I'm at my computer I am reachable by any means of digital communication. If I'm not, I only have gmail on my phone (with a lot of filters so that only time sensitive stuff reaches my actual inbox, the rest is filed away under labels for later review). I tried having some chat apps on my phone, but I had way too many interruptions from whatever I was doing, and I wouldn't have been able to respond with a coherent message anyway. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
- tonylemesmer 10y ago
  I guess its because for chatting with my wife (when we're in separate places I might add!), friends and occasional work project stuff Whatsapp is great to have. Email is clunky and sending attachments for ephemeral but important stuff is inelegant. Twitter DMs are no better than SMS except that you can compartmentalise those users by not giving them your phone number. I've never had Facebook messenger or the Facebook app and I've recently deleted my Facebook account entirely. SMS, email, Twitter DMs, Whatsapp and telephone are my limit but trying to pare this down further without losing some of the utility I infrequently enjoy. In the mid 90s I was in my late teens when I got my first candybar phone. The sparkly lights of smartphones for the last 10 years have now lost their shine. I guess I'm nostalgic for the good old days of SMS and phone only whilst I'm away from the office.

yann63 10y ago

This is because most apps designers want you to spend time in their apps. Instead they should focus do design for time well spent: http://timewellspent.io/ http://timewellspent.io/ Great article published here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232

mafribe 10y ago

I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. The smartphone is the messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication. Whether you get 7 notifications from different 7 apps or 7 notifications from 1 app should not make a difference from the point of view of attention spent, focus lost, time wasted. The following communication pattern has emerged for me, without any design on my side: Snap: frivolous and fun Whatsapp: family, European friends, the Toyota/VW of messaging LINE: Asian friends Skype: high priority work stuff Email: low priority work stuff Insta: friends boasting about their life ;) In other words, different apps function as a way of categorising messages. I find this siloing convenient. Siloing reduces the risk of sharing the wrong kind of message with the wrong kind of person, which has been a great problem with unified messaging systems (e.g. Facebook, or Google's centralisation of all accounts when they introduced G+). As these different messaging systems are (simplifying a bit) fungible, and it is near frictionless to switch between them on a modern smartphone, the phone (it's number or IMEI) is the new dominant form of electronically addressable social identity. This should worry the Facebooks, Snapchats, Whatsapps etc of this world, because the network effects which is the driving force behind their business models has been weakened to a considerable degree. In summary: I welcome the widespread use of heterogeneous messaging and notification apps on the phone, it makes my life easier and safer.

mrweasel 10y ago
>I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their notifications. Your point isn't unreasonable, it's just that may of these services doesn't have the same filtering capabilities that something like has. Snapchat and Instagram, yeah that pretty safe to ignore, but many simply can't. They're "flashing" to get your attention, the systems are designed that way. Sure, maybe people should "just have more willpower", most of us don't though. I noticed that you left out things like Facebook and Twitter, where it's hard to know if it going to be important, before you check. Personally, my rules for communicating: Email - It might be important, but not time critical in any way. My preferred form of communicating in general. SMS - I might get back to you, I may not. SMS is for "just letting you know" sort of things. Phone call - It's important, or you need feedback/have questions. I'm not going to waste time texting or emailing back and forth if it can be resolved by a 2 minute phone call. Everything else is: Don't expect me to react to this. I still feel that with all newer forms of communicating it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email.

jasonkester 10y ago

It amazes me that neither iOS nor Android have an option for "Disallow all notifications from all apps" or "Opt out of notifications when installing apps". Every app I install immediately starts blasting me with notifications, and I have to go in and turn it off for that specific app. It makes no sense. My phone should be allowed to make noise if and only if a phone call is coming in from somebody I know. I don't mind if it shows a count of email messages on the lock screen, so long as it doesn't attempt to distract me from what I'm doing to point them out. And that's it. No other notifications of any form. I see people with things like Slack and IM binging away at them all day long, and I just can't fathom how they get anything done. It just needs turning off.

saurik 10y ago
Why even allow phone calls to interrupt you? I am serious: the world is a much more relaxing place when the only moments something can interrupt you are the ones where you purposely decide "this is a good moment" and look at your phone to see if anything happened. I have been operating without audible or tactile notifications of any form now for years. The only time my phone makes noise is when I have an alarm set to wake me up in the morning.
- morgante 10y ago
  Almost the only people who have my phone number (ie. not Google Voice) are my parents. If they're calling me, it's usually for a good and urgent reason. Also, PagerDuty is set up to call me. If a site I'm responsible or is down, that's something I want to know immediately.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    In the case of PagerDuty, my exceptionally strong preference is for a physical pager, which is passed, fully charged, to the next person on call. If the person passing off the pager hasn't charged it, they hold the pager until it is. Why? Because if I don't have the pager, I know I don't have shit to worry about. I swear to the gods, that literally nearly killed me. The psychological pressure, over years, of being on-call or 2nd on call (small teams suck) bears down. The moreso with technical debt, buggy sites, and verbal lore recovery methods (trust me, I document the motherloving hell out of everything, but there are bits that are buried very, very deep). If you're contracting services or running your own sites, a separate pager still offers benefits. Again, it can be handed off, and you know when it goes off there's trouble (yes, you can also program different ring/dial tones, etc.). I'm also impressed by the robustness, range, and battery life of physical pagers, another benefit.

pepijndevos 10y ago

BlackBerry's Hub is your friend.

richardboegli 10y ago
Or potentially Samsung Focus http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-Unpacked-event-coming-August-2.167755.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-Unpa... This is why I want to buy Note 7.... Samsung could include an app called the Samsung Focus for combining email, instant messaging, and calendar into one convenient window.

ekzy 10y ago

One of the "big solution": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88Ya9krtBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88Ya9krtBk

mxuribe 10y ago

I wish I could upvote this more than once...this article - and associated - issue struck such a chord with me!

exodust 10y ago

Notifications can be turned off per app or completely. The author complains about Starbucks notifications as if he is helpless to stop the onslaught. Just take control of your devices rather than leaving everything at default settings. Go on... embark on an adventurous mission into the settings and flick a few switches like a boss.

dredmorbius 10y ago

I hear Mossberg's message loud and clear, agree with virtually all of it, and hate the present world. He's got the journalistic and tech cred to be heard, and I very much hope he is. A unified, centralised, USER-CENTRIC message-and-notifications-control interface would be wonderful. Android absolutely isn't it. iOS, from comments here, might have some advantages. I've hurled my phone and carry a WiFi-only tablet. Mostly I've the luxury of not requiring to be in instant and continuous contact, and it's a godsend. Looking over Mossberg's data, I'm impressed by his 350 emails/day stat. It's quite close to what Stephen Wolfram reported in his quantified self reveal, and hints strongly at an upper-bound to the number of interruptions and notifications people can tolerate. If Mossberg devotes 2 hours daily to email, he's dealing with three a minute -- one every 20 seconds. If he's devoting 4 minutes to each message, he's spending 23 hours 20 minutes of every day processing email. Clearly, at that volume, there are limits to either how many messages can be processed, how much processing can be given each, or both. Wolfram's observation was that not responding immediately to email tended to be a win for him, as many problems self-resolved. Another hacker trick has long been to download and process entire email spools. RMS does this, @kragen on HN does (or did) as well -- literally pulling an mbox file, and going through and responding to it, with a batch-send later. Marissa Meyer of Yahoo is reported to use Mutt to blast through hundreds of emails in a late-night, multi-hour session, something I've done (or did, when my email spool was still tractable). http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/ http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/

glasz 10y ago

i'm quite amazed by how much of a problem this is for people. they seem to be subscribed to all kinds of useless crap and/or unable to just configure their shit properly. the most i get are 3 notifications per week. 90% of them are crap which i could even disable. and even then i mostly ignore them. what happened to human's ability to ignore things? notifications are not like robots chasing you.

tkjef 10y ago

I made a pretty nice Android app to manage your email & text notifications. Check it out here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono.emailnew&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono... Let me know if you have any questions. Been working great for me for 4+ years.