Trying to quit overuse of mobile phones while not losing access to their good features (maps, calendar, actual phone) is like trying to quit smoking while constantly walking around with a lit cigarette in your mouth.
"Hey man what are you doing with a cig behind your desk?"
- "I'm trying to quit smoking."
It started with my team at work getting together one day (almost a year and half back - some Trump BS was unfolding) and saying, if it gets too bad lets decide as a group to block ports/sites/apps etc on the company network. Slowly the list of things to block started growing.
It was really surprising how easily one could get consensus, that something specific was too distracting, effecting people and group productivity. Nobody wants to be the guy who says HN is addictive. But once someone says it at a meeting everyone starts nodding. News sites were the first to go. Then video. Then social media and most instant messaging/irc. We have moved to Signal to avoid some of the dark patterns in other IM/chat apps. And everyone is using the google/apple well being apps.
Almost everything is done on email or face to face these days. And almost 70 people now in what we call the noise cancellation club.
Right now things get unblocked during lunch time for 30 mins and after 5pm. There are common areas where things are unblocked, but they are intentionally pretty public spaces.
People of course can use their phones, but the fact that there is this environment available where it has become socially acceptable to be phone free, has definitely made a difference.
Before smartphones (generally speaking), the majority of your notifications were on your computer. If you walked away from it, you were no longer getting them.
Today, you've got a notification blaster in your pocket/purse, which is bad enough for work stuff, but if you participate in social media, it's a FOMO machine too. By default, all of your notifications are artificially urgent.
I'm a little older than the average HN'er, so my attitude in life has been closing my social circles to be a very small group of people with richer interactions, as opposed to enlarging it to a large group with less rich interactions. Because of that, it's been pretty easy to wean myself off of FB (not that it was ever a big part of my life in the first place), and I've never considered Twitter, Instagram or anything else to be that interesting. I will admit that I enjoy Reddit - those cute animal gifs are quite relaxing after a stressful day, but I don't use Reddit the way most people use FB or other social media.
When it comes to notifications, I turn a lot of them off. I keep my work notifications on during the hours I consider myself available (for urgent stuff, people know they have to call me), and tightly restrict other notifications that can be distracting.
And if an app doesn't let me disable notifications then I just uninstall it. Facebook Messenger was awful about this, when I saw there was no "Disable notifications", only a "Turn notifications off for 24 hours" option I immediately uninstalled it. Facebook was even worse, ostensibly you could turn notification types off individually, but whenever they added a new type of notification you'd have to go in and turn that off too, or it'd just forget what other notifications you had turned off and you'd start getting them again. Amusingly uninstalling the Facebook app gave me a nice battery performance boost too.
Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. Why should any random person on the internet be able to grab my attention like that?
> Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family.
I figure the next step in the evolution of norms will be this understanding of granularity filtering down to the non-tech-savvy masses.
I use a hierarchy when it comes to prioritizing communications and notifications: Voice > sms > work im/email > personal im/email
Based on that hierarchy, I have different sets of rules as to the types of notifications I get and when I get them.
And I know you can permanently turn notifications of for any given contact because I have done so for one who didn't understand that messenger is not for long conversations that should have been on email, just because you typically get a quicker reply.
Honestly, I didn't even need to go that far. Just turning off notifications for Facebook was enough for me to completely stop using it.