My son invented push notifications, and I dashed his dreams
A metaphor about managing digital distractions
My son, age 11, recently invented push notifications.
I was making dinner when he asked me, “Dad, wouldn’t it be great if Gmail could send you a notification every time you get an email?”
Like father, like son. I also used to think notifications would be excellent. When I got my first smartphone (age: 27-ish) I was relieved that I would never be too far away when an email arrived. Even if I was stuck in a long line at the grocery store, emails could reach me.
But I no longer think that way.
So I pretended my son had actually said, “Hey Dad, can you give a TED Talk right now?” and shared this analogy. I hope it’s helpful as you think through your relationship with notifications, or talking to your kids/students/random-strangers-on-the-bus about theirs.
Distractions on the drive to Florida
Imagine we’re going on a trip to Florida and it’s a six hour drive straight through. Of course, with three young kids, we’ll stop a few times for bathrooms and/or food. So, make that seven hours.
That’s a fair trade: We delay our arrival by one hour, but we get to be more comfortable, stretch our legs, and sustain ourselves with something besides granola bars and baby carrots.
Now imagine that we pull over on the side of the interstate every five minutes and spend five minutes sitting there on the side of the road reading a book. What does this do for our trip? It doubles our travel time from six hours to 12. We spent half of our time not getting any closer to our destination. Don’t worry, though; it’s a great book!
Our brains are much like that car and driver speeding down the interstate. Our brains can do amazing things — we can process complex ideas, study problems, concoct solutions, and accomplish other significant work.
But just like a driver can’t stay in the driver’s seat forever, our brains need to take breaks. We need pit stops and downtime. Our brains make use of this downtime to recover, relax and also to synthesize ideas, often using unrelated pieces of information, that we wouldn’t come up with during a period of intense focus. Did you know that Einstein came up with relativity in a dream?
But too many breaks, especially unplanned interruptions, delay us significantly. Every time we change focus, our brains need time to refocus, find where we left off, and pick up speed again. Some studies indicate this might take as long as 23 minutes.
That’s what notifications from Gmail — or text messaging, social media, Temu, Walmart, or anything else — do to us. They tell us, “Now’s the time to focus on this email or the latest sale.” If we shift our attention to them, we move brainpower from our task at hand to the notification. We have to read it, decide whether to delete it, ignore it, or follow through on it, and then find our way back to what we were doing before.
Soon, we’ve doubled the amount of time to get to our goals, if we ever reach them at all.
These apps do more than just slow us down in our drive toward our goals. They shape our daily experience by offering us the chance to divert our attention. Rather than wait until we’re ready to read email, shop, or leave a comment on a public social media post, they alert us to the opportunity now. If we constantly read notifications, we are outsourcing our personal schedules to other people’s apps.
About eight years after I gloried in the stream of notifications, the novelty had long worn off. My work email never stopped, even in off-work hours, and I was tired of buzzes and dings distracting me from my time with my family. So I turned off notifications on my work email app.
Later on, I realized that I can get through my day just fine without notifications from my personal email, too, so I turned those off. Somewhere along the line, I deleted social media apps and the notifications that go with them. Occasionally when I am clearing notifications, I pause and ask myself whether these notifications would ever help me. If the answer is no, then I’m very likely to delete the app that sent them.
If we constantly read notifications, we are outsourcing our personal schedules to other people’s apps.
The cost of this change has been minimal. To my knowledge, no email has ever self-destructed because I did not read it in time. Occasionally I have missed the opportunity to claim a free item that friends had offered up on Facebook, but that’s fine; I have enough junk around the house still.
But this change has allowed me to relax and be more present in my daily life. I get to decide when and where to check my email, rather than rely on audible disruptions at the random time someone decides to email me. The same thing with Facebook—without the app on my phone, my attention isn’t at the mercy of its notification engine trying to entice me into the news feed.
Best of all, I’ve begun extending this practice further when I go on vacation; I remove my work email from my phone entirely so that I cannot check it even when I want to. I advertise this fact and let coworkers know how to reach me in case of emergency (call, don’t email).
As a result, I have many more moments when I feel like I’m cruising down the interstate toward some goal without the constant stopping to read a book. I can set my phone aside, confident that it won’t bring me anything important, and focus on something else: Playing drawing games or working puzzles with my kids. Going ballroom dancing with my wife. Writing. And even reading! (But not in a car on the side of the road.)
The fact that my middle schooler, who is years away from having a smartphone of his own, would come up with the idea of email push notifications says something about human nature. We like the idea of never missing out, and we like having our curiosity (“Do I have a new message?”) satisfied with as little effort as possible.
But it also shows we may underestimate the power of distraction as well as the power of focus. One has the power to strand us on the side of the road as we deal with someone else’s timetable. The other can drive us toward our goals.
Do you know someone who gets a few too many notifications? Share this article with them along with your thoughts about the power of focus, interruptions and distraction.
It’s been a while since the previous Idea Link as I was writing a story for another magazine. (Link coming soon!)