At Thanksgiving, my teenage niece was fiddling with her phone at the dinner table and accidentally dropped it. Since she had been messing with it every few minutes since she arrived, I smiled and put it in my pocket. From that point on, she was much more engaged with what was going on and participated in conversations. That part was great. However, I was having my pocket buzz every couple of minutes with a barrage of notifications from the different apps she had running. Again I smiled at her and said if my phone did this I would throw it in a lake. Honestly, I'm amazed she can accomplish anything with that much interruption going on.
Now, I know that young people have a much different relationship with technology than old timers like me, but I also know that an interruption is an interruption no matter what your age is. My message here is not that you need to get off of all social media and communication apps. Rather, it is that you need to have control over when and how often you allow them to bother you.
Putting your phone on vibrate is not a solution, it is at best a way to minimize how much you annoy the people in real life around you.
This really comes into play when you are at work or trying to study. If you are doing anything but the most mundane of tasks, you will need some time to get up to speed with what you are doing and will only really make progress when you get in a state of flow. Anything that yanks you out of that state of flow, even for a short while, will cost you several minutes to get back up to speed. So the urge to "quick" check your phone is most likely going to set you back a half hour.
The real trick here is to batch all your alert handling together. Set aside a planned time to deal with all your social media at one time. If you give yourself a dedicated block of time to handle all your social media and email, you will be more effective at your real work, but also at your social media.
Like most things, there are tools for handling the problem, but it's you that needs to change. You will need to overcome FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). We are trained like Pavlov's dogs to respond to notification from our devices. I know I'm not alone in that when my phone buzzes, I'm extremely curious to know what is going on. The trick is to get the device tuned to buzz only when it's something I want to know. Check out this great article on pruning notifications on LifeHacker.
The big takeaway I got from that article was to divide your notifications into three categories:
Important: Get these notifications all the time.
Unimportant: Use notification management to aggregate these notifications so they can be handled in free time.
Useless: Block these all the time.
Our phones by default don't separate the importance of the notifications so we will have to do it ourselves. The Groupon comes in at the same level as the text from your mom.
Take control of interruptions and eliminate them mercilessly. Then in your free time (which you should actually have more of) you will have time to focus and put effort into being the best Instagram/Facebook/Pintrest/SnapChat/etc... user you can be. Work hard and play hard!
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