Get out of your Skinner box
18 months ago, I put my phone in Do Not Disturb mode. I haven’t truned it off yet, and I don’t plan to. 6 months ago, I turned off Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram notifications. Last month, I finally turned off email notifications after months of saying “But I need to have a pulse on my stuff”.
My life has never been better.
It turns out you don’t need to have a pulse on things after all. You just need to get your shit done.
And to get your shit done, you need to think deep thoughts, feel real feels, do real work, and focus on what’s in front of you. A few hours with no interruption is best. As Cal Newport puts it: “You need many hours every day where you’re a little bit bored.”
Being bored is pushing it, but you do need a certain emptiness. You need a vacuum in time and space and mental things that good ideas rush can into. Without the vacuum, there’s no space for the ideas.
You know the moment. It’s that instant when you’re idle for a minute.
You’ve seen all new tweets, the HackerNews homepage hasn’t changed since last time you checked, you got bored of Reddit arguments, Imgur doesn’t have anything new, everyone on Facebook is asleep, and you’re standing on a precipice. A bottomless cliff staring at you. And there you are, holding on for dear life.
An idea is about to happen. You can feel it. It’s on the tip of your tongue, just on the edge of reason. You feel yourself reaching out, reaching across the precipice, tiptoeing right on the edge, juuuuuuuust about to grab it.
And then you take out your phone.
Something “more important” happened. That idea is gone. Your attention was diverted. Phew. You almost did something cool there. “Not on my watch!”
That doesn’t happen to you? Happens to me all the time.
Ideas hurt. Making them real sucks. Carving shapes out of nothing … it’s, you know, hard.
It’s so much easier to be distracted. Boy oh boy, does your phone love to oblige. Your phone will take every second of your attention if you let it. Your computer will, too. Heaven forbid you have a smart watch. You’re doomed.
Why notifications are bad
It’s just a glance, though, right? How bad can it really be?
Truthfully? Pretty damn bad.
Just knowing an unread email is sitting in your inbox can reduce a multitasker’s IQ by 10 points.
You see, the issue with notifications isn’t that they steal your attention for a second and then let you get back to work. The real problem is that more often than not, they’re important.
Your girlfriend texts, “Yo, can you call me when you get a chance?”. Bam. No focus until you do. What could it be? What if it’s an emergency?
Bossman slacks, “Yo, got a min?”. Bam. No focus until you got a min. It could be somanythings-omg-omg. Turns out he just had a question about your code.
Coworker slacks, “Yo, few comments on the pull request”. Bam. Hard to focus until you check. You want it pushed today; what if the comments are blockers and you have to spend hours fixing them?
Email pings, “Yo, we’re still on for lunch tomorrow, right?”. Bam. Running thread in background. Can’t forget to reply.
The list goes on. And on. And on. The problem is always the same: attention residue.
“Attention residue” is what happens when you’re thinking of one task even though you’ve supposedly already moved on to the next.
Think back to a time you were worried and preoccupied about something. Anything, really. Planning some travels or moving is always a good example.
How hard was it to focus and get shit done? Pretty hard, right?
Now remember that’s what happens on a smaller scale every time you get a notification.
You’re addicted, brah
Here’s the real kicker: this stuff is addicting. Very addicting.
Services these days are designed like Skinner boxes. Press a lever; get a reward. Press a lever; get a reward. Lever. Reward. Lever. Reward. Lever. Reward.
This keeps happening until you’re conditioned to love a service, trained to emotionally rely on a service, indoctrinated to feel immense anticipation every time you’re about to open a website or an app.
That, my friend, is addiction.
Not only is this popular enough to have a term — Skinnerian Marketing — but research now suggests that the sort of constant task switching that we love to do shrinks our brains. More specifically, it reduces the gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex. Whatever that is.
The takeaway here is that it’s the part of our brains that controls empathy and emotions.
So, there you are. The slab of glass and metal in your pocket is doing operant conditioning magic tricks on your behavior, and the very part of your brain that can help you get out of it is shrinking. Wonderful.
Please excuse me while I go turn off Slack notifications.
Main sources for this post:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0106698
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