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Does this sound familiar?
I left my phone for five minutes and now I have 12 unread emails, five new text messages, a few DMs on a few different social media apps, a couple of messages on Slack, and some alerts from my CRM. Oh, and I just got an email from the title company that I need to log into their portal for something. Here come some notifications from another app … I’m not sure what this one even does.
If this sounds like your day-to-day, you may be suffering from the side effects of our increasingly connected, tech-driven and productivity-oriented world. Whether you call it digital exhaustion, tech overload, collaboration overwhelm, notification fatigue or any variation thereof, these ailments are plaguing much of the professional world and our lives in general.
In fact, researchers have found that workers toggled between apps and websites nearly 1,200 times a day. That’s a lot of time and a lot of apps.
So what’s one to do when the technology that’s supposed to give us time back just drains it from somewhere else? When the tools designed to increase our productivity have us chasing our own tails instead? When your livelihood demands a computer and a phone, but a screen is the last thing you want to look at?
Although there isn’t much by way of a silver bullet when it comes to fighting this battle, there are several remedies you can use to treat these ailments:
Curate notifications
It’s not much of a secret that tech companies want you in their app and engaging with their platform as often as possible. This is especially the case for ad-revenue-driven technologies, like social media apps, but it’s also true for most business software as well.
The more you use the tech, the more likely you are to keep paying for it. There’s usually a significant amount of thought and effort that goes into finding ways to keep you engaged (or “keeping the app sticky”) as some in the tech world call it.
To that end, most apps will set their default notification settings to “as many as possible.” They’ll often phrase notification text in a way that amplifies the urgency or is intended to create FOMO (fear of missing out). The end result of this, however, is often notification fatigue.
This can manifest as getting so many notifications, you begin to ignore the important ones, or you’re constantly distracted from the things that actually matter.
You can fight back by curating your notifications and turning off anything other than the most important ones. Depending on the app, you may be able to get away with turning them all off. This takes a bit of time upfront, as you have to go into the various apps you use and manually adjust the settings, but it can pay dividends in terms of avoiding distractions and minimizing interruptions.