Focusing
Losing focus
Lately, I got more and more interrupted, not necessarily by phone calls, but by constant notifications, either from my work phone or laptop (Slack, Teams, emails, ...), and if not a notification, I would feel the need to check my Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.
Nothing new indeed, but I thought it was time to stop that.
I wrote about my "cure to Twitter interruptions" in that article, but wanted to cover more broadly this focus struggle.
Regaining focus
I had already started disabling all notifications on my Sailfish OS phone, so I did the exact same thing on my work laptop and iphone: disabling all notifications and popups, either by having the "Focus/DND" mode in MacOS set to my working hours, or by disabling the notifications altogether. And when I say notifications, I mean also the badge icon, you know this little red pastil which urges you to open the corresponding app!
As for Twitter (or X), since Piepmatz, the Sailfish OS client, didn't work with
Musk's latests changes in their API pricing,
I had no reason to use it extensively on my phone. So what I did on my laptop
was actually very simple: just close Twitter's pinned tab!
All of a sudden, this fixed my urge to check out Twitter several times a day: I
open it once a day, and sometimes not at all... cause I forget about it :)
I did the same with LinkedIn, the reasoning behing being that if I am not opening an app or a website by myself, then probably I don't need that app/website always opened after all :)
It all boils down to one thing: apps and websites are fighting for your attention, and by having a tab opened, or allowing notifications from it, then you are allowing them to interrupt you.
What others think
Ruben recently tweeted
about his struggle with notifications/focus.
I was thinking about that article for some time, but Ruben's tweet decided me to
write it.
While I completely agree with Ruben's feelings, I think it's really up to us to take back control of our focus:
- disable all notifications
- use DND/Focus mode as much as possible
- open only the tabs you really need in your browser - close anything else
Tags: Misc