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Comment by excalibur | Hacker News Reader

Use some sort of parental controls app, lock the phone down so it can do exactly the things you want it to and nothing else. If necessary you can have a spouse or other trusted person set a password on it that you don't know, so you can't just turn the restrictions off.

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I consider a big part of the problem to be notifications, and their respective default settings.

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.

A lot of my smart phone usage lately seems to be around managing how much attention my phone can grab from me. I let very few apps send me notifications on my phone. I check it enough without it making noises at me.

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?

One regrettable casualty of this is that I've noticed that almost everyone I know is super unresponsive to texts now. I'm not expecting a fully-interrupt-driven ability to grab someone's attention at any time, but ive even seen cases when you're actively in conversation with someone about something concrete (eg details of a plan) and they drop off in the middle of it. I still think this is pretty rude, but its understandable given that they haven't bothered to make their notifications higher granularity (for my part, I've disabled notifications at the Android level for most of the abusive apps, like Facebook)

> 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.

Call me old school, but for conversations relating to something concrete and time sensitive, I prefer to do a voice call. I don't trust any text based medium for that.

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.

Sure, there's no accounting for preferences. But for many, a voice call taking the place of every text conversation is a lot _more_ intrusive (albeit in a time-limited, focused way). Shooting off a couple of texts to nail down the details of when you're meeting up for prearranged plans is convenient for calls because it doesn't have to be fully synchronous: send the text, and if the other person responds when you're free, then you can have a synchronous conversation. There's no real analogue with phone conversations other than playing phone tag, which seems like a lot more mental load.

I have an android phone, but it allows you to long-press any notifaction for an app and turn that apps ability to notify of. That is a system feature, not an app feature.

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.

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