TL;DR

This is a long article and you don’t need to read all of it to get the general idea. That being said, I gave this a lot of time and thought, so if you spend your time reading it you’ll probably get a thing or two out of it. That’s my intention and hope.

However, the short version is that notifications are designed to use our primitive fight-or-flight response to manipulate the actions we take and decisions we make during the day. So, if you want to control your time consciously (which, by the way, is the definition of the ever popular term “Time Management”), you need to eliminate most of the notifications you receive during your day so that you can focus on what really matters.

And with that short introduction, this is my 6-step guide to implement Notifications Zero.

If you’re like me and you try to explore the philosophy behind everything, I used the introduction of this article to explain why we need to care about and work with something so seemingly insignificant as notifications. So here we go!

Introduction: a maverick attitude

The evolution of notifications and cavemen

Let’s think for a moment about our ancient ancestors, cavemen. They used to live in small groups, usually determined by the size of their cave which gave them vital security from outside threats. Their environment was hostile to say the least. Saber-tooth tigers were living nearby and hoping to eat them (can you imagine that?).

So they relied on groups and used a very handy mechanism: notifications.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a notification is:

the act of telling someone officially about something that has happened or will happen.

Notifications long predate language. In fact, even animals use them. They use notifications to alert others from imminent danger, feeding opportunities, and so on. (However, for the sake of my point in this article, I’m going to focus on cavemen).

Cavemen not only needed notifications on a daily basis, they required them. Without notifications, many or all of them would have eaten a poisonous plant (and died), or been devoured by a pack of saber-tooth tigers (and died), or attacked by a bigger and more powerful tribe (and died), or fallen off a cliff (and died). Or faced any of the many deathly dangers they had to face on a daily basis (and probably died!).

Through millions of years of evolution, and as a consequence of situations like these, “we” have developed a fight-or-flight response. Which, at that era, was extremely useful. To put it simply, our biological operating system said: “if you receive a notification, you have to leave whatever you’re doing and listen to it. Your life could be at risk”.

Our differences with cavemen

Now that we’ve got an idea of the rough life our ancestors had, let’s see how we as modern humans are different from them.

Well, we’ve got less body hair. That’s one difference. Right?

The other differences come in the nature of the notifications we receive, the number of them, who sends the notification, and our goals in life.

The (many) sources of notifications and their nature

Back in the Paleolithic era (which covers 99% of human existence! 🤯), notifications were mostly carried by a person, and this change of terminology is not trivial. As cavemen groups were usually small (about half a dozen), if you had shared a cave with them, you wouldn’t have been scrolling or sorting through notifications throughout the day. In all likelihood, you would have received a single notification once in a while.

However, if you have received a notification… oh yeah, you would have run, my friend. As fast as your cavemen legs could.

With the great (and not so great) excess of technology we live with today, you probably have access to the following devices:

• A smartphone.
• A laptop.
• A smartwatch.
• A tablet.

And that’s, let’s say, the basic setup. There are even more smart devices you can get your hands on.

With the introduction of all this sophisticated equipment, most of the notifications you receive aren’t essential life-or-death notifications from one person or group. Instead they are, for the most part, useless distractions designed to drag you from whatever you’re doing (working, having lunch with a friend, playing with your child, etc). Notifications are a very dangerous opponent. You are just one click away from getting totally derailed.

The (ever increasing) number of notifications

Nowadays, instead of receiving one notification every once in a while, we receive dozens if not hundreds of notifications a day. According to a comprehensive study by Dan Ariely from Duke University, in 2018:

The average person gets between 65 and 80 phone notifications a day.

“Designed to distract”, as Dan puts it. This means you’ll be distracted (ie, dragged from whatever you’re doing) about a hundred times or more per day. That’s not even including notifications from your laptop (email, instant messaging apps, news, etc), your smartwatch, or any of your smart devices. If we did, the number would rapidly increase many fold.

The problem I have with this is that our reaction to notifications is primitive and preys upon our fight-or-flight response mechanism. Which means that

notifications are designed to take advantage of our primitive brain to manipulate our actions during the day.

Heck no. I won’t let my devices control my time. I’m not a caveman anymore. I’m a person living in a predator-free environment looking to thrive instead of merely surviving.

Our goal in life

And that last sentence takes us to the last part of the problem analysis before we can jump into a straightforward step-by-step guide to implement Notifications Zero, which is the difference between us and our ancestors, the cavemen, regarding our goals in life.

Back then, even mosquitoes could have killed you (they still do, but in much lower numbers). So the caveman’s goal in life was simply to survive: avoid death, find food, reproduce. That was pretty much it.

In today’s world, we aren’t here to survive, we’re here to live. We’re here to thrive in life.

Think about it for a moment. The difference is obvious, but do we typically act as if thriving in life was our actual goal?

Here’s something else to ponder: if we live reacting to notifications, and considering that in today’s world we’re bombarded with notifications all day long, all life long, where is the space or the attitude for thriving? Isn’t reacting to notifications just like floating in a big sea of mumbo jumbo?

I want to thrive in life. Therefore, I will work hard to prevent others from triggering my primitive responses. That’s how I manage my time in a productive, healthy, and enjoyable way.

What is Time Management?

But what does Time Management mean, exactly?

According to our beloved Wikipedia,

Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity.

“Conscious control of time.” That’s the key. Are we actually controlling our time consciously, or just reacting to the events of the day?

My point here is simple: Notifications are one of the many things that manipulate your actions and decisions throughout the day. And that’s the opposite of controlling your time. If you truly want to gain more control over how your days, weeks, and years develop, you need to place attention and effort on how you manage your time.

Time management is more of an attitude than a technique or methodology. Time management is saying “I own my life, I won’t let anyone or anything control what I do with it”.

6 steps to incorporate Notifications Zero

1. Hide the Notification bar

Our eyes are constantly analyzing what we see. At this moment you’re probably reading this article while other things sit on your screen calling for your attention.

Can you handle reading an entire article without being distracted by something else? Chances are you can’t, and you’re not alone.

That’s why I say hide your notification bar. In fact, hide the entire taskbar or other widgets that display information that is not imperative for the work you’re doing. When you work on something, give it your full attention. Go full (screen).

My advice:

• Hide task-bars.
• Hide other toolbars you don’t really need.
• Block pop ups! Of any sort.

2. Use a single notification for “unread emails”

• (Notification 1) “Andrew, you received a new email”.
• (Andrew) “Thanks for letting me know! I’ll check it out as soon as I’m done with this”.
• (Notification 2) “Andrew, you received a new email. You have now 2 unread emails”.
• (Andrew) “Yes, yes. Give me five minutes, please”.
• (Notification 3) “Andrew, you received a new email. You have now 3 unread emails”.
• (Andrew) “Yes, I know. I know. 5 minutes. I need to finish something very important”.
• (Notification 4) “Andrew, you received a new email. You have now 4 unread emails”.
• (Andrew) “Alright. Let’s see.”

That’s it. Andrew is now checking emails. He’s lost his focus and his precious, difficult to achieve state of flow. And who knows if he’ll be back on task again or get distracted yet again by something else? I sure hope those emails are worth it. We should give Andrew some credit for waiting until the 4th notification before giving up, although “silence! I’m working” may have been a better answer.

Will you allow your mail to distract you? No, your focus is much more important. Just:

• Silence email notifications.
• Schedule several times during the day to check your email (once per hour should work for most people). Control your time rather than reacting every time you receive an email.
• Limit the amount of notifications (in this context, emails) you receive.

You can also check out my 7-step approach to implement Inbox Zero.

3. Silence Slack

Or any other instant messaging tool.

Imagine you’re in an office and your door is open. Anybody can walk into your office and start talking to you (in other words, distract you) and you’d listen.

To make things worse, imagine that you get distracted even if the message is not for you!

Slack, Discord, Teams, and the rest of these applications are very popular now that remote work is the norm. And they are very useful too. But the more powerful a tool is, the more consciously and carefully you have to handle it. Otherwise, it can chop off your arm if you’re not careful.

To get the most of these tools I suggest that you:

• Mute all sound notifications.
• Disable message previews.
• Enable only one notification for “unread messages”. In Slack this is just the icon with a red dot on it (screenshot below).
• Mute all channels for teams you’re not actively working on. You can still get a notification if someone tags you (“@abel what do you think?”).

4. Close WhatsApp Web

Many people use WhatsApp Web to continue to read messages on their laptop. Even though some respect is due for not using the phone while working, you’re still getting distracted with a tool that you don’t only use for work but for your personal and social life.

“Cling! Cling! Cling!” is not the sound of focus. It’s the sound of distraction.

Even if you feel like you need it open, you can follow these steps:

• If you use WhatsApp for work, try to switch to the business version so that you only receive messages you need for your work.
• If you don’t use WhatsApp for your work… Close it. Remove the possibility for distraction.

5. Limit social WhatsApp groups

Willpower is like a muscle. It gets stronger as you train it, but it gets weaker if you don’t. Many people rely too often on their willpower, and that’s a mistake. You can more sustainably rely on your habits and the systems you build around them to nurture, improve, and protect them. But relying on your willpower isn’t enough.

With that being said, although you may have the willpower to ignore a notification from your phone, after the 5th or 10th notification (or on a day you feel less motivated), you’ll reach out to it, unlock it, and sigh with relief as you sort through social media, messaging, etc.

And even though these notifications can be of any nature, social groups are a terrible source of incoming messages. The point is not whether you’d belong or not to social groups,

the point is your attitude for how you control your time.

Let me add, however, that social life should not depend on WhatsApp groups. In fact, stop for a second and think how much each of the groups you belong to support you or any part of your life. Yet another thing for you to consider is that many of these groups are at best a source of non-productive discussions, and at worst a hotbed for pornography, violence, and other things that are not good for your mind.

To avoid unwanted distractions:

• Exit groups you don’t really need.
• Silence groups entirely. Or turn notifications off at least when you need to concentrate, have your meals, work, or do anything more important than checking messages.

6. Disable irrelevant notifications for each app

If you’ve reached this point, you’ve eliminated a lot of notifications. Good job! But we’re not finished yet.

This is critically important: do you remember the last time you went into an app to do something but you got distracted by a notification within the app, and then left without doing what you meant to address in the first place? I bet this happens a lot, doesn’t it?

Remember, it’s not about muting notifications. It’s about eliminating them.

Let’s take, for example, LinkedIn. I use it on a daily basis, so I know the amount and type of notifications it sends my way. To be frank, I don’t need most of them. I simply don’t need to know everything LinkedIn wants to grab my attention with. That’s why I went to LinkedIn’s settings and disabled the notifications I don’t need, and only left the ones that deserve my attention (and therefore, I want).

That way, when I go into LinkedIn, I don’t get distracted by an icon saying “23 [useless] notifications”. If I have a notification, I read it, because I previously told LinkedIn that I only care about that kind of thing.

By the way, to configure Notifications on LinkedIn, click on this link: https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/notification-channels/on-linkedin or go to Notifications → click on View Settings (on the left) → and then adjust the settings in each category to fit your preferences.

Alright, so:

• Every time you open an app and see notifications, evaluate which ones you care about.
• For all the others, go into the settings and disable them.
• If the app doesn’t have that option, maybe it’s time to delete it. After all, the app doesn’t care about your time, so why should you care about the app?

Final words

You’re not in this world only to survive. You have to thrive! You don’t have to react instinctively to every notification you receive or allow your devices and environment to throw hundreds of notifications at you per day, controlling what you do with the precious time you have been given.

Set the right attitude to manage your time and thus your life. Turn the noise off.

I hope you find this topic as interesting as I do, and I truly hope this empowers you in your mission and in your life.

Please, leave any questions or suggestions you may have in the comments below.

Thanks for reading.