Inspired by a recent book I finished, Deep Work, comes this weeks challenge!
Remove all notifications from your cell phone! If you have kids you communicate with, ask them to call you instead of texting. Emails, turn off notifications. Social media platforms, turn off notifications.
Don’t know how to do this? It is simple, go to Settings in your phone. Go to notifications. Under notifications style select off for all apps. This exercise will take you less than 5 minutes. I bet you won’t. Stop finding excuses on why this won’t work for you. You can live for a week without notifications on your cell. What will end up amazing you is the amount of time you will get back in your day from doing this.
Technology Is Taking Over Our Lives
The day and age we live in involves us having many devices pinging us left and right. We are being trained to have our attention bounce between different things. Don’t believe me? There is a good chance you scrolled up to update your feed which is why you are now seeing this post.
Our devices are being designed with the thought in mind to give us constant hits of dopamine. Each time I get another like on a post, hit of dopamine. Each time I get an Airbnb notification, hit of dopamine. Each of these hits keeps us wanting to come back to the source. The source in this instance is the technology we are living with in our pockets.
Back In The Stone Ages
I remember in middle school when cell phones had become a thing. Before cell phones were a hit you had hefty phone books where you would write down all your friends numbers. That is right, you had to remember these 10 digit strings of numbers. The crazy thing was, I remembered upwards of 15-20 10 digit numbers because that was what you had to do. The crazier thing was you had to pick up the phone to call someone if you wanted to speak with them.
Now cell phones were a hit. You now had this mobile device you could take with you and call friends from. Not long after cell phones became a thing, texting was invented! I still remember to this day my thoughts on texting at the time.
My Thoughts On Texting
Why would I text someone when I could pick up the phone and call them!? There was no reason to text someone. If I wanted to talk to them, I would call. Six months after developing this thought process, the common thought was ‘why would I call someone if I can text them’?
Holy crap…how the world has changed even more with apps, social media, machine learning and artificial intelligence. We now live in a world where our technology own our life. They dictate when we wake up, how we interact with others and for a lot of people how they make money.
How times have changed. In this weeks challenge, challenge yourself to remove the constant distractions of technology.
Key Takeaways:
- Technology designs focus around providing dopamine hits. The hits you get when your phone sends you a notification is what keeps you coming back.
- Removing notifications on your phone allow you to get into a deeper sense of work and focus.
- Stop opening your dang phone!!!! Getting a lot of notifications isn’t a good thing!
