The One Question That Fixes Your Notification Distraction Problem
The One Question That Fixes Your Notification Distraction Problem
Turning off every alert is bad advice. Sort your triggers into three buckets instead.
Imagine you’re ten minutes away from an important client call, making one last change to your presentation.
A calendar alert appears: Client meeting starts in 10 minutes.
Interruptive, yet still useful.
Then a group chat message pops up: “Quick question when you have a sec.”
Same basic mechanism, but you likely experience a very different reaction.
In Hooked, I called cues like these external triggers: information in our environment that tells us what to do next. An email, notification, app icon, calendar reminder, or colleague tapping us on the shoulder can all prompt us into action.
Product designers think carefully about these triggers because getting the cue right can change what someone does next. But those of us on the receiving end should be just as deliberate about which cues we allow to prompt us.
In Indistractable, I suggested asking a simple question whenever an external trigger grabs our attention:
“Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it?”
A customer email may deserve a response without requiring an immediate interruption. A project-management alert may contain useful information without needing to appear the second someone updates a ticket. A colleague may need access to you without needing your attention at every moment.
For this reason, I don’t think turning off all notifications is particularly useful advice. The better approach is to sort our recurring triggers into three buckets:
Keep itif the trigger reliably prompts an action you intended to take, such as a reminder that it’s time for a meeting or time to hit the gym.
Remove itif the trigger repeatedly pulls you toward something you did not intend to do. For instance, you don’t need to see every “urgent” news alert or message in random WhatsApp groups.
Revise itif the trigger is useful, but you want to change where or when you receive the trigger. For instance, I want to see Instagram notifications, but since nothing from that app should interrupt my day, I only check it on my desktop.
The next time something pings, dings, or rings, notice how you react and what action you take next.
Does it pull you away from what you intended to do, or does it pull you toward what you already planned? Then decide whether to keep it, remove it, or revise it.
I created a short External Trigger Scorecard (free for my Substack subscribers) to help you sort the recurring triggers competing for your attention so you can finally get them to work for you instead of against you.
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