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This will sound sarcastic, but it’s not. Stop visiting HN more than once a day. Repeat this for every “news”/“feed” site and app that you use. It sounds comple
by floatingatoll 9y ago
This will sound sarcastic, but it’s not.
Stop visiting HN more than once a day. Repeat this for every “news”/“feed” site and app that you use. It sounds completely nuts, but it forces you to stop slicing up “read the news” (a focused activity) into “read the news distractedly” (a timesliced activity).
Shut off push notifications for anything that is not money/shipping related or a direct IM with individuals. Email notifications off, news and feed notifications off, social site notifications off, Twitter “favorited” notifications off.
Turn off notification sounds for everything that’s left except direct messages from human beings or e.g. Pagerduty.
Aside from direct IMs — I got a total of 10 pushes yesterday. None made a sound. None required a response. None required interrupting my focus.
Do this for a month, on desktops, laptops, mobile. Your focus will improve dramatically, simply for having not wasted all your brain’s dopamine on “new email alert sounds”.
EDIT: Meditation is far more challenging when your brain is constantly looking out for the next “new notification” ding. It took me nearly a month to overcome the Pavlov ding response when I first implemented this approach in 2005. You’re going to hear a lot of phantom dings for a long time.
EDIT2: If you haven’t already done this muting approach, set your push notification sound to the red alert klaxon from BSG (three repetitions) – or any red alert sound from any sci-fi show. If ever there was a way to amplify the visceral effects of notification sounds to your conscious thought level for evaluation and consideration, that’ll do it.
EDIT3: If you’re autism spectrum, you may have “executive dysfunction”, which is a willpower disorder of sorts. Focus is willpower-related. There’s no magic fix, but awareness is half the battle, and it may offer steps you can take to reduce your life’s “willpower” drain so that you can have more of it for “focus” instead of whatever.
- CookieCats 9y agoI started doing this about a week ago, and it's nice to hear it took you a month, because it's kinda been painful this past week. I still unlock my phone and look at the homescreen only to realize "oh yeah, I removed that stuff so there's nothing to do here". I'd thought that by removing social/news feeds, I would find something else to do with my thoughts by necessity, but really nothing has replaced the "open phone for 30 seconds to find something briefly entertaining". I was expecting to be bored, but it's more of a low-level frustration at all times except when I'm focused on something, like I know I could be finding some trivial but interesting thing.
- vletrmx 9y agoI just started using an app called Offtime. It will lock you out of certain apps for a period of time. I'm finding it to be extremely useful so far.
- floatingatoll 9y agoI’ve found that there are times where I’m frustrated at everything and nothing is interesting now that I’m not always seeking 30 second bites. Unexpectedly, that’s turned out to be a key hallmark sign for “I need to take a nap”, and sure enough, I usually end up with 20-30 minutes of hard REM sleep and then I’m interested in the world again.
- anderspitman 9y agoI like this. The inability to permanently disable Facebook Messenger notifications is what finally pushed me over the edge to remove it from my phone.
- floatingatoll 9y agoI believe if you keep badges enabled, that’s just enough to fool it. And I do keep badges enabled, because they’re passive and I learned not to care all the time about them.