How often do you check notifications?
How often do you need to check notifications?
The first should be smaller than the second, but by how much? There's rapidly diminishing returns the more frequently you check something.
I could ignore my messages for a few days before people would start calling to check I'm alive. To keep life running smoothly long term, at least every eight hours is ideal.
Balancing those two numbers, I'd say I need to check them once a day. On any given day, but preferably not every day, I could ignore messages for that long without any issues. If I'm out of it, I'm busy, my battery is dead, any other of the infinite obstacles which life throws up appears, I know I don't need to worry about checking my notifications for 24 hours.
Default notification settings assume you want to know about everything immediately, perhaps barring a few fixed periods like sleep.
Do you actually want that?
Notifications give us the illusion that we never need to pay attention to anything. It'll find you when it needs you.
But the frequency of checks hasn't disappeared, just shifted. If you trust the sound to alert you, what you've really done is changed your frequency to the time it takes you to check the screen after the ding.
Every single second, you are checking that there isn't a sound. Not consciously, not literally every second, but that's the rule you've adopted.
You'll be fine without checking notifications for a few minutes, sure, but hours?
Days?
Do you know how long is safe? Do you know how long feels safe?
When important notifications have the same signal as an automatic update, you can't discern what's safe to delay. Everything is urgent.
There's a tension and obligation embedded there that nags at you. We've all had phantom notifications. The instinct which causes those isn't natural or normal.
When's the last time you left home without your phone? I've ignored my phone for hours before, I could safely choose to take a half hour walk without it.
I almost never do. It's uncomfortable, knowing I'm fully cut off from people who might want me at any moment.
It's uncomfortable to choose to be free, even for a moment.
The only way to get rid of that discomfort is choosing it over and over again.
Personally, I check my messages every few hours because I'm using my phone for something and see the notifications, or I want to send something to someone. The only thing which can bother me while I'm not actively using my phone is a calendar event or a phone call.
Calendar events should be obvious. As for calls, people only call me for emergencies or if something is happening right now. It's so rare it doesn't register as something I'm checking for the absence of.
Your needs will vary. I have minimal hard obligations to other people. If you have people dependent on you, your response time might need to be in minutes.
But you should make the choice for what makes sense yourself, not let defaults change your lifestyle. What does the world need from you, and how long would it have to be before it mattered that you hadn't seen it?
I've been focused on messages because that's the most grounded form of notification. A person you know directly wants something from you.
Notifications in general are entirely different. Everyone and their engagement teams' carefully written adaptive reminders want a part of your attention. They aren't even worth elaborating on. Turn them off, you'll get to it when you get to it.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
Notifications are such an overdone topic that I doubted I'd ever bother writing about them, but here we are. We all know notifications are bad by default, and that we should disconnect more. I'm not sure I've done a good job explaining the specific anxiety behind it that I'm trying to shut down. I'll come back to it eventually, notifications were just the easiest example.
This was a weird one to write.
I was in a great flow working on a broader topic, then realized I hadn't settled my thoughts on it enough to write about and scoped down to a smaller part. That smaller part had notifications as one of many examples and slowly grew until it didn't make sense to keep it as one post.
The spark of the original idea has died down as I tried to articulate it, but it's still around in the drafts. Hopefully I find that energy again, I was having fun that first hour.
- Rew