TL;DR
Turn off your phone notifications. You control the device, it shouldn’t control you.
Everything about phones is awesome!!!….right?
Alright, so I’ll be the first person to admit how AMAZING a tool the smartphone is. If you would have told me 10 years ago that you would have access to the knowledge base of the entire freakin world in your hands, I would have backed away slowly so as not to upset the crazy person. Immediate communication to anyone on the planet, instant connection to news, basically a laptop in your pocket, a MASSIVE feature set! Heck, I’m even typing this blog post on my phone with a Bluetooth mini keyboard. Holy crap is there nothing these things CAN’T do?!
You would think all of these features are only a net positive, right?! Well, it depends. When it comes to focused productivity, the smartphone can work directly against your goals. Being bombarded daily with social media notifications, emails, text messages, and news updates can really hamper when you’re attempting to get big stuff done, or even if you just want to be focused on/present in the moment. A study by Microsoft Research has shown that it could take users 25 minutes on average to return to task after responding to an email notification. Now how many emails do you get a day at work? How many other notifications do you stop and look at through the day? Holy cow, that’s a lot of time down the drain.
So should you ditch email and social media? No way can you live without them, right? This is a really tough situation, as I’m sure that many of your family/friends use social media to contact you and email is the lifeblood of business communication, but even a former Facebook executive is getting off of social media because it’s bad for you . So how the heck are we supposed to get our time back? Well, you definitely have options, and I’ll list a few here ranging somewhere between “uninstalling an app” to “living off grid in a cave”.
You can turn off notifications for specific apps or for the whole phone
If you find yourself only getting distracted mostly by a few apps (Mine are Instagram and Twitter), you can just turn notifications off for those specific apps. You can go into each app and use their control settings to disable notifications, or you can do it via your Android/iOS settings. Or if you’re someone who gets easily distracted by everything on your phone, you can just turn off all app notifications together. Here’s a link to an Android guide , Here’s a link to an IPhone guide .
Put your phone on airplane mode
I find that when I really need to get some work done, scheduling out some work time and setting my phone to airplane mode will help keep me free from distractions. This might be difficult for some, especially when working in an office where email is the main form of communication, or perhaps your significant other needs to call you about something important, so you really need to decide what works best for you. I use airplane mode in combination with the next tip.
Have a set schedule to check email and social media
This is a habit that took me quite awhile to build. I used to check emails first thing when I woke up, as well as last thing before I went to bed. Holy crap that was miserable, my day was started by loading up my head with stuff before I even had coffee, but I didn’t know any better. Tim Ferriss has a good point about this in his blog post here, “time has no value without attention” , basically checking things this way was just making me miserable because I would dwell on tasks I couldn’t do until later. So after weeks of training myself, I now check emails around 10am and 3pm. These times aren’t a hard rule, it’s just that this worked best with my personal schedule, so you’ll have to figure out what works best for you.
Overall
I’m a huge fan of social media and technology, as long as it’s not causing a problem with my life. I think the tools are amazing and have a place, but we have to be diligent and make sure they’re not running our lives.