Why 'Do Not Disturb' should be your default
...even when (especially when) you're doing nothing.
Lately, I find myself pining for the days of AIM. Things were so simple back then. You’d boot up the gigantic family Dell in the basement or living room, or run back to your dorm room between classes to “check your email” (because that IBM ThinkPad was too clunky to carry around all day). There, you’d find your favorite people waiting for you. The act of signing online signaled an eagerness to engage. (Remember the AIM door noises, heralding the arrival of giantsfan69420 or D0LphIn_sPaRkLE273?) Occasionally, nobody worth talking to was online, but that was alright. You could still use that time to curate your away message (the original subtweet!), selecting the perfect song lyrics to reel in a specific target—usually the subject of an inappropriately intense crush, someone you’d interacted with IRL exactly twice.
What I’m really missing, I think, is the neat compartmentalization that life before smartphones provided. Having a dedicated time and place to reach out and be reachable made the whole thing feel like an escape. We talk about how work’s infiltration of our mobile devices has impacted us, but not enough about the added toll the other stuff takes. The stuff we opt into. The stuff that’s ostensibly supposed to be fun and enjoyable, like texts and DMs, but becomes much less so when it’s thrown at us in unmanageable quantities. Especially if you’re an introvert and/or have social anxiety and/or sensory issues and/or executive dysfunction and/or bad boundaries and an overdeveloped sense of guilt. (Which is…every last millennial, if my calculations are correct?)
If you fall into any of the above categories, being technically available at all times to everyone with whom you’ve ever exchanged numbers is a recipe for angst. Someone you haven’t thought about in years can just…reach out when you least expect it and you’re supposed to drop what you’re doing? And be helpful or funny or interesting or otherwise make meaningful contributions to the conversation, even though you literally did that five minutes ago in a separate thread with an entirely different group of people you only kind of care about???
No thank you!!
I know this is going to sound very OLD MAN YELLING AT CLOUD of me, but WE WEREN’T MEANT TO LIVE LIKE THIS. This is why I’m proposing that we normalize:
Keeping your (non-urgent) notifications off, and;
Replying to (non-urgent) messages only when you have the time and bandwidth.
This may come as a shock but: it turns out smartphone notifications aren’t great for your overall well-being. And these negative effects extend beyond the superficial dopamine hits you get when your phone glows with new notifications (which feel good in the moment but ultimately lead to unhealthy dependencies).
This article from Discover magazine gives a decent overview, but to summarize: phone notifications have been linked to depression and anxiety and ADHD-like symptoms even in people who have never been diagnosed with ADHD. This is, experts believe, due to the mental effort it takes to refocus on the task at hand after your attention is diverted by an alert. One or two notifications might not have much of an impact, but there’s a cumulative effect as the day goes on and the total number of notifications you receive ticks upward. That total can be staggering—according to more conservative estimates, the average smartphone user receives between 60 and 80 notifications a day. And a recent study of teen smartphone usage found that its teenage participants received an average of 240 notifications a day.
As a result of that notification fatigue, your ability to be creative, retain information, and even make basic decisions suffers. As behavioral scientist Kostadin Kushlev tells Discover, “Over time, in order to complete the same amount of work, you actually need a lot more self-control [and] cognitive resources to do that refocusing. The idea here is you would get tired faster and then later on in the day you’d be even more prone to distraction because you’re just like, ‘Okay, I’m tired, I’m just gonna scroll. I give up.’”
But what if you have really, really good willpower and make it a point not to look until you’ve finished whatever it is you’re in the middle of? Doesn’t matter, friend. One 2015 study found that simply receiving a notification had the same effect on participants’ ability to focus as physically picking up the phone to make a phone call or reply to a text.
With all of this in mind, any outsized reactions to digital interruptions start to make a lot more sense. And my reactions are definitely outsized. On days when my phone is particularly busy, my body responds to incoming notifications as if threatened. I don’t merely feel flustered; I feel angry. I admit, sometimes this anger gets misdirected towards the people I love, which then causes me to feel guilty, which then makes me feel more resentful as I project the expectations I’ve placed on myself onto those to whom I owe replies.
If you are someone who considers themselves relatively competent at keeping up with all of it, I commend you! But also, I would like to offer this gentle reminder that multitasking is a myth, and also, things are probably going to get much, much worse when it comes to the demands on our attention. It’s a good idea to get those boundaries in place while you still can.
All of this is to say: these seemingly-insignificant interruptions we navigate now are not to be taken likely. As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing:
“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like ‘annoying’ or ‘distracting.’ But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live.”
If you aren’t quite ready to commit to the Do Not Disturb lifestyle (and what a lifestyle it IS), there are also settings you can lean on to control the flow of notifications. They don’t make it easy to find, but they’re there. For example, I just learned that iPhone lets you set up notification summaries to be delivered up to 12 times per day and I’ve never felt MORE POWERFUL.
Kushlev, the aforementioned behavioral scientist, co-authored a study that showed that notification batching can, with the right cadence, increase feelings of well-being among smartphone users. The group who saw the most improvement in his study received notification batches three times per day. Interestingly, his study also found that receiving notification summaries hourly had no impact on well-being, while turning off notifications completely resulted in more anxiety. Which makes sense. As things stand now, there can be legitimate social costs to turning down the volume on your notifications. (Which is why doing so will only feel sustainable if there’s collective buy-in.)
Here’s where I include the requisite reminder for all you guilt-ridden introverts out there: You can’t show up for other people (or yourself) if you’re constantly depleted by an onslaught of attention-gobbling pop-ups. Turning off, or at least minimizing, notifications becomes especially important during downtime, whatever that looks like for you—whether you’re on a hike, or reading, or in full couch-rot mode. (FYI, this is me giving myself permission to keep notifications off when I’m watching America’s Sweethearts this weekend.)
If none of this has radicalized you yet, consider the messages we receive from the people who are arguably the most responsible for the mess we’re in now. They just love to go on and on about the importance of carving out plenty of time and space for the things that matter most to us. The authors of a separate smartphone study I skimmed decided to get a little sassy, including this epigraph from Steve Jobs in their introduction. (It’s my favorite when researchers get sassy.)
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we have is time.”
First of all: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Second: I can’t believe I agree with Steve Jobs about something! Unfortunately, the devices and products he and his peers have pushed are never going to make it easier to utilize that most precious resource in ways that actually serve us. It’s up to us to do the compartmentalizing necessary to stay (somewhat) sane.
(But if DND still feels too dramatic, can we please, at the very least, bring back away messages?)
Today’s rabbit holes:
If you want more DCC after America’s Sweethearts, I highly recommend listening to America’s Girls from Texas Monthly
How to set up notification summaries
An oral history of the AIM away message, which includes this unhinged quote from someone who worked on AIM in its early days:
“Now you wouldn’t use the term, but pre-9/11, we used to say it wasn’t a project, it was a crusade. We were zealots. Towards the end though, it brought mostly sadness in terms of what could have been but wasn’t, and I moved on to other things.”God bless the Internet Archive
I still regularly think about Pen15’s AIM episode. A veritable masterpiece.