The tyranny of messaging and notifications
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My phone should be allowed to make noise if and only if a phone call is coming in from somebody I know. I don't mind if it shows a count of email messages on the lock screen, so long as it doesn't attempt to distract me from what I'm doing to point them out. And that's it. No other notifications of any form.
I see people with things like Slack and IM binging away at them all day long, and I just can't fathom how they get anything done. It just needs turning off.
It seems that the social norm has shifted to the point where an unscheduled phone call is actually considered a bit rude.
I really wish that was the case but my observation is that only really applies with people over a certain threshold, much the same way that that people my age (36) remember growing up in a house where noone used the phone after 9pm since it was considered the absolute height of bad manners to ring someone for anything less than "someone died/the nukes are falling".
These days I just put my phone in airplane mode and ignore the thing most of the time.
That said, I tend to teach everyone around me that phone calls are for important stuff. That is, I simply don't pick up if I don't feel like it, unless I'm suspecting the call may be about something very important. I'm tired of people thinking I'm available 24/7 for random irrelevant stuff. I don't have much guilt about not picking up, because if something is really important, the caller can always tell me so via text message, and then I'll usually call back.
I'm sorry, but "Dave from Microsoft Support", or "Carol from Card Services", or the misdialed number in some language whose geographical locus is at the antipodes, Isn't. Fucking. Important.
Yes, if you've got a family, wife, children, parents, boss, best friends, whitelist them. Is that really more than a dozen, tops, two dozen sources?
Every. Fucking. Thing. Else. Can. Wait.
Most of it can die in a fire.
The telephone as it exists (POTS/Wired, mobile) is an absolute abomination.
If they're calling me, it's usually for a good and urgent reason.
Also, PagerDuty is set up to call me. If a site I'm responsible or is down, that's something I want to know immediately.
If the person passing off the pager hasn't charged it, they hold the pager until it is.
Why?
Because if I don't have the pager, I know I don't have shit to worry about. I swear to the gods, that literally nearly killed me. The psychological pressure, over years, of being on-call or 2nd on call (small teams suck) bears down. The moreso with technical debt, buggy sites, and verbal lore recovery methods (trust me, I document the motherloving hell out of everything, but there are bits that are buried very, very deep).
If you're contracting services or running your own sites, a separate pager still offers benefits. Again, it can be handed off, and you know when it goes off there's trouble (yes, you can also program different ring/dial tones, etc.). I'm also impressed by the robustness, range, and battery life of physical pagers, another benefit.
I despise the idea of carrying around an additional device.
I'd like a more customizable Do Not Disturb feature, which would let you put people in groups that have different rules. For instance, when I'm working, I'd like to filter out any calls from everyone but colleagues, and even then I'd like my phone to ignore calls from anyone but my immediate team unless they call several times within a couple of minutes. (Except when I'm support, the opposite would be true.)
When I'm not working, I'd like to ignore pretty much any call which is not from people designated as friends, and at night only allow calls from very close friends and immediate family.
Very, very rarely do I get a useful call from an unknown number. In the past year, it's probably happened maybe four or five times, and all other times it's been telemarketers or otherwise useless calls that can go straight to voice mail.
Speaking of voice mail, the visual voice mail feature that was touted as revolutionary in the original iPhone announcement is something I still want. I've never seen it outside of the states, and even then, only on Verizon or whatever it was. I haven't seen it in years though -- is it still available?
Because you're working in a dynamic organization and people need to communicate with you on an immediate, real-time basis, perhaps?
Lots of businesses still operate this way, and lots of people operate this way. Its not always unproductive.
I'm certain that on both iOS and Android, notifications are turned on by default, and have to be explicitly disabled. Both devices support "Do Not Disturb" modes or similar, which can silence notifications, but to my knowledge they still collect in the drawers by default. I'm very familiar with Android's interface to silence all notifications from an app, as I usually don't care for them. (Twitter's in particular are obnoxious.)
eg: A timer app can schedule a notification at a specific time in the future.
Truth is they're not getting much done but they feel like they are.
Actually that's an over simplification. With something like Slack people get less of "their own" work done but more of certain types of group activity such knowledge sharing, forming a consensus and decision making.
In other words any kind of activity that requires extended periods (30mins+) of concentrated work will suffer if you're tapped in to Slack or otherwise. That includes things like writing code, creating a presentation, planning a project and similar...
I think the potential for IMs to be distracting is there, but my closest friends all fully understand that I will respond whenever I have a moment, and so will they, so we don't have a sense of urgency with the thing. It's more like an extended conversation with history, so we can come back to it, catch ourselves up by reading what they wrote (sometimes hours inbetween responses) and pick right up where we left off.
I feel constant barrage of notifications and distractions simply fragment your time. Like, whether you do that communication in one short block or keep the mail/IM constantly open, you generally accomplish the same amount of "communication" in a day. But the second case is like fragmented heap - it reduces the length of consecutive free memory blocks, making you increasingly unable to allocate larger blocks of continuous memory. Instant reaction to incoming messages does the same with concentration, making it hard to perform tasks that require longer stretches of focused work.
Built-in apps are pre-approved, but their notification permission can be revoked.
That's the only sane way to use a smartphone. People call me crazy (what if you miss something important?!), but to me crazy is allowing to be interrupted every time you get an email, somebody sends you a message, the stupid game sends you another useless notification, etc.
If it's urgent, people call me. Otherwise I want to conserve my very limited focus.
EDIT: I also hate phone calls, so I tell my family, "if I'm busy I might ignore your call. If it's a matter of life and death, call my twice." YMMV, I've often called back anxiously after receiving 7 phone calls from a relative, and it wasn't anything important.
If I ever get a notification on my phone that isn't a human trying to interact with me I immediately disable the notification and/or app.
With email I often (daily) unsubscribe from whatever impersonal newsletter shows up in my inbox.
I save my attention for people who take time to message me personally. Red badges on my phone are irritating.
Whitelist: Inbox. High-priority senders.
Blacklist: Trash / treat as spam. One model is to add an address to your blacklist as you unsubscribe it. Any further messages feed spam filters.
Greylist: Previously unseen. This goes to a bucket for sorting through. You can apply more heuristics to this (keyword / sender / references, etc.).
Backlist: Known low-priority senders. It basically goes into the "deal with it later" file.
Anything that's specifically sortable (e.g., technical mailing lists) goes to its own space.
My fundamental problem is that few tools offer the means to do this type of sorting.
Gmail's filters are, the more I use them, increasingly pathetic.
Procmail is powerful -- I've built up highly extensive filters with it over decades. But it's also a pain to use, largely unmaintained and unmaintainable. It lacks a simple means to, say, point at a list of addresses and say "good, bad, or ugly". Adding addresses specifically to rulesets is somewhat tedious. And as with other cleint-side tools, it doesn't work with IMAP services in a reasonable way (you can treat IMAP as POP, but then you lose filtering for all other clients accessing the server).
There are some other tools -- there's a ... Perl? based tool, Mail<mumble>, which is cleaner than procmail but also different and I've not wrapped my head around it. There are IMAP-based tools, but I've had little luck with them.
Email's generally simply getting crufty. I've resisted calling for a replacement for a while, but increasingly, it's time.
Yesterday I fired up a Nokia 6310i as my main phone and put my SIM card in it. I setup a Zapier zap to SMS me when I get an important email (as defined by Gmail filters). I've now realised how FEW important emails I get but how often I used to get mail notifications (a lot).
Now my data apps on the smartphone only have access to Wi-Fi resulting in far fewer notifications. My notification settings are already quite restrictive on all apps.
Notifications and messaging are governed by a 2-way awareness. If people know you are contactable (e.g. by watching the little blue tick in Whatsapp) then they'll contact you more and spend more time checking to see if you've read their message. If they know it takes 10 hours for you to respond then can choose their channel more appropriately.
I've not yet had to use Google Maps for navigation (requires data) - lets see how that turns out on my next long distance car trip.
Pain in the arse that I am now carrying 2 phones, but lets see how my experiment pans out. Might be a total car crash (figuratively speaking)
Bonus: your battery will last longer.
I like to keep the two worlds apart, if I'm at my computer I am reachable by any means of digital communication.
If I'm not, I only have gmail on my phone (with a lot of filters so that only time sensitive stuff reaches my actual inbox, the rest is filed away under labels for later review).
I tried having some chat apps on my phone, but I had way too many interruptions from whatever I was doing, and I wouldn't have been able to respond with a coherent message anyway.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
Twitter DMs are no better than SMS except that you can compartmentalise those users by not giving them your phone number.
I've never had Facebook messenger or the Facebook app and I've recently deleted my Facebook account entirely.
SMS, email, Twitter DMs, Whatsapp and telephone are my limit but trying to pare this down further without losing some of the utility I infrequently enjoy.
In the mid 90s I was in my late teens when I got my first candybar phone. The sparkly lights of smartphones for the last 10 years have now lost their shine. I guess I'm nostalgic for the good old days of SMS and phone only whilst I'm away from the office.
The smartphone is the messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated communication. Whether you get 7 notifications from different 7 apps or 7 notifications from 1 app should not make a difference from the point of view of attention spent, focus lost, time wasted.
The following communication pattern has emerged for me, without any design on my side:
Snap: frivolous and fun
Whatsapp: family, European friends, the Toyota/VW of messaging
LINE: Asian friends
Skype: high priority work stuff
Email: low priority work stuff
Insta: friends boasting about their life ;)
In other words, different apps function as a way of categorising messages. I find this siloing convenient. Siloing reduces the risk of sharing the wrong kind of message with the wrong kind of person, which has been a great problem with unified messaging systems (e.g. Facebook, or Google's centralisation of all accounts when they introduced G+).
As these different messaging systems are (simplifying a bit) fungible, and it is near frictionless to switch between them on a modern smartphone, the phone (it's number or IMEI) is the new dominant form of electronically addressable social identity. This should worry the Facebooks, Snapchats, Whatsapps etc of this world, because the network effects which is the driving force behind their business models has been weakened to a considerable degree.
In summary: I welcome the widespread use of heterogeneous messaging and notification apps on the phone, it makes my life easier and safer.
Your point isn't unreasonable, it's just that may of these services doesn't have the same filtering capabilities that something like has.
Snapchat and Instagram, yeah that pretty safe to ignore, but many simply can't. They're "flashing" to get your attention, the systems are designed that way. Sure, maybe people should "just have more willpower", most of us don't though.
I noticed that you left out things like Facebook and Twitter, where it's hard to know if it going to be important, before you check.
Personally, my rules for communicating:
Email - It might be important, but not time critical in any way. My preferred form of communicating in general.
SMS - I might get back to you, I may not. SMS is for "just letting you know" sort of things.
Phone call - It's important, or you need feedback/have questions. I'm not going to waste time texting or emailing back and forth if it can be resolved by a 2 minute phone call.
Everything else is: Don't expect me to react to this.
I still feel that with all newer forms of communicating it's pretty hard to beat either a phone call or email.
it's pretty hard to beat
either a phone call or email.
Everything else is:
That's really the key. I might prefer email, but I'm the only one in my group of friends and family that works that way. SMS is the preferred choice for my family and Facebook for anyone else. In most cases you just need to accept that the people you need to communicate with may have other preferences.
I would be surprised to find that someone didn't have an email address though. Don't you still need that for signing up for most services? Whether someone check their email or not is a different story of cause.
I gifted my 13yo niece a year of Spotify recently and, to create her account, they required an email address.
She looks at me half-confused. "I can just use my usual, right?"
"Sure," I say, a bit confused by the question and watching to see what that means.
Turns out in her peer group they all use 10 minute expiring emails from various free net services. Gmail is something they just hold onto for notifications from school and older relatives.
For me the pattern is: I subscribe to any new social / communication service and see what happens. Probably because I work in IT, I'm an early adopter, and when I first subscribe to a service, I have nobody to talk to, and I let the app 'simmer'. With most services this never changes, but occasionally one of them makes it big, and all of a sudden 'everybody' in some group that I participate in uses the service.
My social world mostly self-selects into neat silos, e.g. Europeans rarely use LINE, older people rarely use Snap, and I amplify this tendency by judicious choice of whom I communicate with over which channel, e.g. work contacts don't get on my Snap. I learned from the Facebook disaster.
The smooth interface of a modern smartphone makes switching between different apps near seamless, so I really don't care which one I use. They are all good enough for me. Each app is completely fungible, and if one of them disappears, we switch to another one. So the network effect is still there, in that an app is as useful as it has members, but there is no longer a strong lock-in.
I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.
Call me spoiled, but I think modern OSes - not just mobile, but desktop too - force way too little in terms of UX. That's why on my computers I like to route everything text-related through Emacs. That joke about it being an "operating system" is actually a compliment. It gives you a very big set of operations that are consistent for all tasks that involve any kind of text.
But barring Emacs-OS for mobile phones, I'd settle for a decent dashboard that could efficiently summarize all messaging channels in one place, and allow easy interop between them.
And the phone number and/or the IMEI is the technological identifier that ties all our identities together.
Non-SIM (Wifi-only) phones.
Multiple phone-users.
There is no universal identifier. I may absolutely insist there isn't. And I strongly suspect phone tech (number-based dialing) is on its way out. For all the reasons Mossberg states, the one app I hate most is the phone, and I don't have one. Haven't for years. There are phones by which I can occasionally be reached. There's a mobile phone which occasionally has service. Both are highly deprecated.
Assumptions about identity tend to fail. Perversely. Badly.
Those for whom phone/phone number/IMEI is not enough might encounter problems with the current state of social networking.
They do, and they cope. It's not that it is mathematically impossible to share a smartphone.
Think of poorer families that have one mobile per household. Think of I-dont-know-what-kind-of-thinking-leads-to-that families that use a shared e-mail (or even Facebook) account. Hell, think of my younger sister who for some time borrowed smartphone from my mom, because she didn't have one but wanted to check Facebook / Instagram / whatever regularly.
One device per person & one account per person is not universal when you start looking outside of tech-inclined people and their immediate families. Sure this assumption probably holds for most people, but I'd wager that the "most" here means something like 60-80%, and not 99.999%.
60-80% is enough for the network effect to overcome everything else, and for the phone/IMEI to become the de-facto standard. Just like TCP/IP/Ethernet/Wifi became the networking de-facto standard despite other networking protocols existing (and being superior in some dimensions like ATM). The remaining 20-40% will adapt. Some of them will not have their needs met. The world moves on.
The interesting question is: what does the new fungibility of social software mean for the lock-in-based business model of the likes of Twitter/Facebook etc? How will they regain lock-in? Will they be able to add non-fungible features, like e.g. WeChat, or will they whither?
Now make it two people, one account, multiple buugy IMAP 4 server interactions, and a compulsive tendency to delete old email "so it doesn't slow down the computer".
Plus, of course, an absolute inability to tell something to just one of them.
Multiple other confounding issues.
It's a terminal to a bunch of different application services, none of which talks to each other well.
In the Emacs (or unified use case), I could snarf in content (as text / JSON / whatevs) from one messaging queue / stack / channel and post it out to another or others. On mobile, options for copying and pasting text alone are horribly crippled, to say nothing of the fucking pathetic editors.
E.g., G+ does not support highlighting and copying selected text or URLs from its Android app. Yes, you can copy an entire message. Then, say, past that to the six line editor window HN offers me.
I've got emacs and vim on this system (Termux offers both, also a freestanding Vim client). But I cannot copy to/from the system clipboard from these. Instead, I save to the App-specific directory of another editor, open the file there, copy text, and paste it.
Yeah, I've done that. Yeah, it fucking sucks.
At least on desktop I can install, say, "It's All Text" as a browser extention and pop up any textarea-editable content into a preferred Real Fucking Editor and muck with it.
(Infinite Internet Pointz to anyone who can suggest a way of invoking Vim with a specific set of arguments, say: ":set tw=0 linebreak wrap syn ft=markdown" just as an arbitrary example.)
- Siloing helps to separate communities. In particular, it reduces the probability of accidentally sharing content with the wrong crowd. I'm happy that people can't even see who's in my contact list. On twitter people use automated blacklists to block people based on whom they follow etc.
- One size does not fit all. Insta is ideal for sharing photos, but not good for sharing code. BitBucket / Github on the other hand ...
Agreeing with CPLX, I'd say the UX of modern phones makes is really easy to switch between apps, to route content between apps if required (rarely in my experience) and has enough similarity (e.g. shared keyboard, same cut/copy/paste mechanism) so that using all of them is pretty seamless and requires little in the way 're-wiring' one's muscle memory when changing apps.
I'm also an emacs user, but there is too much visual stuff going on in my communication these days that I can no longer route it through emacs. Moreover, I do most of my communication through the phone these days.
[1] Using a space/domain on the web avoids the changing phone numbers dilemma, etc.
I've yet to incorporate that as my central interface, but I am oh so fucking goddamn tempted.
(The biggest problem: early in my nerddom I learned emacs, after having learned vi ... then took a gig where the boss didn't believe in adding anything to the Unix server that wasn't put there by God Himself (a/k/a the vendor). So no emacs. Lost all my finger memory. It's been too painful to recover it since. I really should just lock myself up in a room and get on with it, no?)
Yeah, I've been thinking about the same thing recently. Especially given that I keep my life organized via org-mode + DropBox combo and I'd love to be able to invoke full agenda view without access to PC...
That said, because I often end up doing things like Arduino workshops, which require hooking up USB devices with specific drivers to them, it's pushing me towards a new laptop. TBH, the new Surface tablets from Microsoft looks like an excellent choice for my use case, but they're sadly expensive as hell (not unreachable for me, just not worth the marginal utility I expect to gain from the new device).
> I really should just lock myself up in a room and get on with it, no?
Yeah :). Or maybe, just use the fact that you've learned the vi keybindings and switch to Evil mode (or even Spacemacs). That's what I'm trying to do now, but with almost zero prior exposure to vi bindings. I've become convinced that vi has much better approach to keys than Emacs, with that whole command language thing.
A centralised messaging tool provides a centralised messaging archive. If you want to find something, you can search one place, one time, with consistent syntax. You don't have to scramble through a half-dozen or more services to find crap.
A centralised messaging tool offers a standard interface. Even if it's dealing with systems which have their own capabilities, your editors, shortcuts, contacts, etc., are in one place.
A centralised messaging tool offers you central control over your contact lists. Fuck any app that wants my contacts list. Just completely, totally, 100% fuck it. For starters, that's not my information to give. You can pile on any number of privacy-and-security based arguments on top of that.
In the IM days, there was a set of autonomous systems that evolved: ICQ, YIM, AIM, MSM, Jabber, etc., etc., etc. And eventually, single unified clients which could speak all of them. Or turn all of them the fuck off in one go.
We're moving backward.
If you want to go on a diet, don't exercise self control by not opening the bag of Oreos. Throw the fucking bag of Oreos and don't buy any more.
Practicing diet hygiene by only buying healthy foods is far easier than trying to avoid eating crap that's in front of your face.
Practicing security hygiene by eliminating situations which give rise to security risks (e.g., buffer overflows, and OpenBSD's rewrite of core libraries to that effect) is far easier than trying to remember to check your string lengths on every operation.
Practicing mental hygiene by eliminating the very possibility of interruption is vastly easier than reminding yourself to resist Every. Single. Fucking. Temptation. That. Comes. Along.
See Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, first chapter or so. Covers this well.
But unlike Oreos, applications on modern smartphones are much easier to obtain and a lot of people still believe something along the lines of "more 'apps', more productivity", so you have to pull out arguably more effort. Regardless, people are to blame themselves in both cases.
Tablet, wifi only, no phone.
Very few social aps, and reducing those.
Ditto messaging.
Google's crap is installed and cannot be removed, though some apps can be disabled.
I'm routinely queried by websites whether I'll allow location data. No, I won't. That's disabled at device level, and I should never be queried for that. Ever.
Somehow, Google Hangouts got itself convinced I was logged in. I'm not. Got some random connects. Backed out and blocked the shit out of as much of that as possible.
Google Maps pestered me for location information every fucking time. No, that's not how I used this app, and I'm not going to provide it. Finally uninstalled/disabled the app.
YouTube running pre-roll ads. Finally disabled that.
Google Play Store wanted to give me games. I walked through disabling and ripping out as much of that as I could. I think some of it's been walked back.
Google Chrome browser: autoplay video, audio, popover crap, and no adblock. I'm about ready to uninstall / block it.
Various other nags, including "application optimisation" from Android itself. Really, just fucking figure out how to fucking optimise yourself and leave me the fuck out of it.
I use this device for research, some writing, and some online posting. That's pretty much it. It still bugs the fucking crap out of me and is shit for what it does.
I'm relatively convinced this is the last full-on Android device I'll buy. It's been semi-useful, but frustrating as fuck, a privacy nightmare, the tablet itself is locked down pretty hard, and the keyboard-case from Logitech was defective from purchase and now Logitech are refusing to replace it with same -- I'd need a case, stand, and keyboard to replace it, they're offering at best a keyboard. Lawsuit and consumer complaint time.
Pretty much a clusterfuck all around.
Just take control of your devices rather than leaving everything at default settings. Go on... embark on an adventurous mission into the settings and flick a few switches like a boss.
Great article published here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232
A unified, centralised, USER-CENTRIC message-and-notifications-control interface would be wonderful. Android absolutely isn't it. iOS, from comments here, might have some advantages.
I've hurled my phone and carry a WiFi-only tablet. Mostly I've the luxury of not requiring to be in instant and continuous contact, and it's a godsend.
Looking over Mossberg's data, I'm impressed by his 350 emails/day stat. It's quite close to what Stephen Wolfram reported in his quantified self reveal, and hints strongly at an upper-bound to the number of interruptions and notifications people can tolerate. If Mossberg devotes 2 hours daily to email, he's dealing with three a minute -- one every 20 seconds. If he's devoting 4 minutes to each message, he's spending 23 hours 20 minutes of every day processing email. Clearly, at that volume, there are limits to either how many messages can be processed, how much processing can be given each, or both.
Wolfram's observation was that not responding immediately to email tended to be a win for him, as many problems self-resolved.
Another hacker trick has long been to download and process entire email spools. RMS does this, @kragen on HN does (or did) as well -- literally pulling an mbox file, and going through and responding to it, with a batch-send later. Marissa Meyer of Yahoo is reported to use Mutt to blast through hundreds of emails in a late-night, multi-hour session, something I've done (or did, when my email spool was still tractable).
People raised to be "native" with technology have several filters.
First, they realize managing notifications is highly important. They ruthlessly unsubscribe, block and restrict.
Second, different uses are compartmentalized between different services and those services are given different abilites to penetrate your attention. You don't get work snapchats. Slack has a snooze mode and you don't set up your mobile notification center to keep them around until dismissed.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, they aren't compelled to jump at every attempt to contact them. Messages can go unanswered, and life goes on.
Seriously, many digital natives are as clueless as anyone else regarding their smartphone and, more broadly, regarding computers as well.
Pareto's rule at work -- 80% of smartphone users only use 20% of the features. And unfortunately, those features to tweak and control notifications live in the often unused 80% of the phone.
If my wife's phone is any indication this is probably more indicative of being a programmer than being a "digital native."
That's a big premise that I didn't know nor I believe it's true. Notifications are supposed to tell you when something happens, which is the opposite of saving you time.
The other half are muted so I can poll them when I'm not in the middle of a focused task as that would break my concentration and I'd need a while to regain it.
The only two I keep active and not blocked are slack and Inbox, both having low traffic for me, because I use them for important work-related stuff.
1. Turn phone silent and flip it screen-down
2. Quit Mail.app
3. Zoom in (MacOS) about 10%, so I can't see the border of my screen, with the menubar, the notifications in the dock etc.
I just wish it extended to browser notifications. They're increasngly becoming a problem.
Whoa, awesome! It's one of the features they tell nobody about...
Let me know if you have any questions. Been working great for me for 4+ years.
the most i get are 3 notifications per week. 90% of them are crap which i could even disable.
and even then i mostly ignore them.
what happened to human's ability to ignore things? notifications are not like robots chasing you.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-Unpa...
This is why I want to buy Note 7.... Samsung could include an app called the Samsung Focus for combining email, instant messaging, and calendar into one convenient window.