Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Distractions are our lives now. You can choose to minimize them. Start by turning off “new email” notifications. You may not miss much by not knowing the moment an email arrives. If something is truly important and urgent, they will usually use multiple means to contact you, like calling you.

You can also graduate to removing almost all notifications from your phone. I say almost all because the beauty of Slack is that it never differentiated between being mobile or at a desktop (like Skype did) so you might need notifications from your work Slack to appear if you are not really present. Also, get rid of non-work Slacks on your phone, if you spend too much time on Slack on your phone, it could help eliminate more potential distractions.

The next level is to remove all native applications for anything that you think might distract you. It is much, much harder to fall into the rabbit hole of infinite scroll type binging with a mobile web experience. There is just enough friction with mobile web to snap you out of your trance, usually.

> they will usually use multiple means to contact you

like via Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or SMS or WhatsApp or one of your many Slacks or Discord or Google Hangout or your work email or your other personal email or....

There are so many ways to communicate now and that's not necessarily a bad thing but I definitely get communication fatigue.

> There are so many ways to communicate now

Yes, the idea to remove most distractions is to limit those communication mediums that give you near-instantaneous notifications of “activity”. Ignore all communication via all other modes until you decide, if ever, to check. There is a reason why some people communicate solely via Instagram DMs or Snapchat (it is where they live their lives).

I do not use Facebook regularly but I do keep the account. I’ve noticed that Facebook will send an email notification if something important happened, like someone’s parent passing away.

Usually, if someone who you know is calling your phone, it is probably important. Monitoring services like PagerDuty even allow you to “self escalate” from a text message to an automated call, for this reason. PagerDuty uses the same set of numbers so they could be added to a contact if you are whitelisting all incoming phone calls.

"Eliminate distractions" is the command that will accidentally lead the AI to "Kill all humans".

Do Not Disturb mode, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your life will change. No notifications, no vibrations, no dings, no texts, no calls. It's wonderful. You, and only you should be in charge of when you use your phone. Not some random caller or E-mail sender, not some app developer's "growth hacker", not AI running on some service's backend. Take back control of your attention!

> You, and only you should be in charge of when you use your phone.

Life happens. Your wife falls and breaks her wrist. Your mom has a heart attack. They want you now, not when you deign to look at your communications. And until you do look, you won't know if it's that she broke her wrist or that she had a heart attack.

If you are disconnected enough from other people that nobody has a valid demand on your attention, then you're part of the problem of social disconnection.

Yet somehow we were able to handle emergencies before mobile phones existed. I’m not willing to sacrifice quality of life 99.9% of the time just to be able to handle the odd 0.1% outlier situation.

People usually can wait. For the rare case where they can’t, there are even ways to poke through Do Not Disturb mode.

iOS has a feature where you can setup certain contacts to override your 'do not disturb' settings. Check that out.

While that is certainly useful, what about local hospitals, police departments, when someone borrows someone else's phone you call you etc.

IIRC iOS also has a feature which allows through someone who rings multiple times in quick-ish succession?

Android does, and I haven't had reason to disable it yet. Should that be necessary, people can leave a message. They might have to, even if they were whitelisted as I don't take my phone with me to the bathroom or to most meetings.

If "something" happens, by the time the police are contacting you it's no longer an emergency.

Responding to an ambiguous worry of an emergency that may never even occur during your lifetime by allowing yourself to be continually interrupted by spammers (traditional call-based and new app-based) is actually a decent illustration of the overarching societal problem.

I found my quality of life greatly improved when I started going to Facebook once a day, no app or notifications. So far it is improving again as I have stopped using Facebook. They sure are desperate to get you back, though, it's been two weeks of twice- or thrice-daily emails.

The straw that broke the camel's back in this case was the behavior of the Messenger notifications. They filled messenger with so many bullshit "friendaversary" and other notices that I stopped paying attention and I missed my real, actual friends who were trying to get in touch with me. Such a transparent Skinner box, I couldn't respect myself if I went along with that kind of manipulation. Then when I found it's basically impossible to disable Messenger it became clear that I had to delete it all. I'll download my data from them and call it a day.

It's such a shame because Facebook put me in touch with a number of people that I only sent a Christmas card to, if at all. But I think the nature of these social networks is that the more addictive and manipulative ones quickly crowd out the decent ones. Metcalfe's Law seemed like a great thing until you realize that the growth has to be exponential to have a chance of "winning".

It's all just never been a problem for me. I see an email in the notifications on my phone and either archive it there or swipe it away so I'll see it when I'm at a pc. I get lots of notifications from various things all day but they're just there and not an issue if I'm doing something else.

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