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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

Turning off all notifications on my personal phone was a life changer. No longer I feel like I'm wearing an electronic collar. Giving everyone who has your contact information access to your attention is poison to the ability to concentrate. Another big thing for me was cutting down on infinite scrolling, blogs and videos and spending a lot more time with long form content (mainly books). Attention is our most precious resource and we should guard fiercely against attempts to monetize it.

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My phone is always on mute (no vibrate either)

Only alarms to wake up

Having a family and responsibilities made this infeasible for me. Most apps on my phone are denied notifications, but people can still text/call me.

I also have family and responsibilities. But I am very careful whom I give unfettered access to my attention.

Everybody who depends on you directly (partner, children, parents, and extended family) should be on you VIP contact list and have direct access to you. I find that reduces my anxiety. I don't get distracted by notifications, or the thought that someone might be dying and trying to reach me.

Just commenting about phone calls

I have stranger phone call anxiety and the other thing is spam/scam calls. Which thankfully my phone has been good at flagging/blocking.

Regarding notifications I used to have phones that either had LED blinking indicators or sound/beeping ahh, crazy used to just drop what I was doing to check it.

What are the odds? A couple of hours after I posted my comment above I got a WhatsApp message saying that my aunt was in the ICU. She died minutes later. This stuff happens.

The issue for me is, for example, my wife drops my kid off for a camp and then the camp calls me in an emergency. So I can’t just only take notifications from known callers.

You can do this. I do. Known numbers only and whitelist school, doctor, etc. If you really wanted to go further you could have a second number via google voice you only give to those places. Maybe even tie notifications on that to your calendar where you put your kids events.

I just can’t… it might be some counselor’s random cell phone calling me. Plus the kids go to many camps per summer, and many activities during the year, so I’d be constantly updating my phone book even if not for the main issue.

Kids survived perfectly fine in the past without their parents being available 24/7.

Many summer camps require that you be available to retrieve your kid if e.g. they start showing Covid symptoms. I'd love to drop them off and forget about it, believe me.

But you can still let these people contact you, just not real-time. An hour or two delay should be perfectly acceptable. When they're on camp far away, does it really matter?

these are day-camps.

It seems disrespectful to my wife and the camps to refuse to be available for emergencies.

The kids that survived, survived perfectly fine.

The kids that didn't survive were buried and no longer interact with us.

Unless you as an individual are somehow more equipped to deal with emergencies than camp staff, I'm not sure being reachable would make any difference. I would hope in a real emergency, the first call would be to the appropriate emergency service regardless.

I am also a parent coming on the end of a summer, and whitelisting people who _may_ contact me about my child sounds like a nightmare.

I guess you could get a dual Sim phone and only give out the second number for that kind of situation.

The teacher from school or preschool will call from basically random phone. Possibly own phone. Or whatever office she is in phone. Camp counselor always calls from own phone which is fairly often different one then where you are supposed to call.

Neither of these calls often. Maybe once a year you get call like that. But when they call, you really want to pick up.

Few years back brother of my spouse took his wife to Spain (thousends kilometrs from here) to drive around and see some sights. At some point they got a flat tire and while he was trying to fix it two nice gentlemans on motorbikes took everything they had by force (including phones). My spouse brother managed to borrow a phone frome some stranger that was driving by. And when he tried to call the only number they both could remember, his fathers, he did not answers.

Can You guess why? Thats right - he also had a policy to not take phone calls from unknown numbers (especially foreign). They had to go to ours country ambassy in Spain (which took a while) and beg for help.

Since that day his father answers all calls :)

You can leave a voice mail. I don’t answer to unknown number anymore due to heavy phone spam. My thought is "if it’s really important they will leave a message".

That's the sensible answer. Nowadays it is crazy to answer the phone. If the message is useful to me then I respond.

Thats interesting - I have two phones (with different numbers of course) and I almost get no spam calls (maybe a bit on the company phone but its still very low number). I must be doing something right here :)

Generally that seems like a good idea. In case of father from my story somehow this was not possible - I do not remember why - either he had voice mail turned off (it could have been paid service at that time) or he did not know how to use voice mail.

112 is way easier to remember then anyone's family member numbers and way more effective in emergencies.

You can get money for gas, food and shelter by calling 112 ? I do not think this works that way :) Jokes aside - by calling father they could get access to other members of family who could help with their knowledge what to do next and I bet they would do a lot more to help them than anyone one the other side of emergency number(direct money tranfer could save the day here).

On most recent version of Android, they have a whitelist feature where repeat callers (2 times withing 15 minutes) can bypass DoNotDisturb.

Only my close family are whitelisted.

Most time people call twice during an emergency. You could also say to call back again in case of emergency in your voicemail message.

Not sure about iOS, but with Android you can create exceptions for selected contacts in the do-not-disturb mode.

I've added my family members to that exception list, and leave the phone on do-not-disturb mode 24/7.

This works well for some people, but not universally as noted elsewhere in the thread.

I guess it basically comes down to: how likely is a call from an unknown number to be important for me? It turns out this is wildly different for different lives.

If you have Android. Minimalist is very helpful in blocking app notifications.

If wife is nice, she can be whitelisted, no?

I have family and responsibilities, too. I've so far survived by allowing ONLY notifications from texts and phone calls. The key is that I'm able to ONLY give my text information and telephone information to family.

I know others probably can't do that, but it works great for me.

Humans lived centuries without instant messaging. Probably nothing wrong happen if you miss a call.

I disabled notifications for every app on my iPhone aside from Phone, Messages, and an app that tells me when I left my car door unlocked.

I deleted all apps that distracted me, Instagram, Facebook, Firefox, Email, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram. I check the ones I care about on my laptop/desktop. I deactivated my Instagram/Facebook because I kept logging back into them and scrolling for a bit -- not for very long, but any free moment I'd look for entertainment there.

Any time I need some app, e.g. YouTube to show a video to a friend, or Uber to catch a ride, I'll download it and delete it once I'm done with my task.

I've found that my screen time has gone down drastically. I used to spend 3 hours a day on Instagram, Facebook, Hacker News. Now I spend closer to .75-1.5 hours, with about 50% of that being very difficult to trim down because it's mostly useful (1:1 texting, finding music on Spotify, using Maps). I still have HN, xkcd, and the NYT for reading, but that's not much more than 15-20 minutes of my day, which I think is acceptable.

I also put my phone in grayscale with reduced white point. This makes it much less enjoyable to read, and reduced white point makes it much more difficult to see/use, which reduces the time I spend.

It's a lot of effort, but it's so easy to get sucked into your phone. Every little moment when I'm bored I'd pull it out and look for something. It's so much more valuable to be doing nothing, and to not be controlled by little notifications on my phone when something happens.

I wish I could get an absolutely stripped down iPhone. I want Maps, Spotify, Messages, Phone, CarPlay, and that's about it. Maybe it would let me switch profiles for travel that has extra apps, or to some entertainment mode with a time-delay (e.g. if I wait 5 minutes I can open up Netflix). Something like the Light Phone [0] seems interesting, but not having CarPlay is a non-starter because I find it so useful. I suppose I could have two iPhones -- one for everyday carry that is barebones, and a second with the rest of my apps that I can keep in a drawer 95% of the day, but that sounds just so wasteful.

[0]: https://www.thelightphone.com/

iOS focus mode added recently is a godsend!

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