The case for silencing notifications
Growing up in the 1990s my obligation to “respond instantaneously” to anything seems (from patchy memory) to have been limited to:
- conversation at home
- conversation at school
- conversation elsewhere
At no point during the day would I be abliged to notice something digital, evaluate its importance & urgency, and act one way or another. On the whole, “events” were in-the-flesh threats that would take place through the day at intervals great enough not to distract from one another… and, when they did, one could assess the situation clearly enough to intuit a path forward:
- decline all but one of the overlapping events/invitations/conversations/decisions
- use the spare change (regained time & headspace) to conduct oneself with increased grace through whichever item had won the battle for attention
Watching The Social Dilemma in 2020 brings it all home in a violent shocking stab of realisation, as to just how much of that has changed… within a single generation. In 2020, I have a weekly reminder set:
- work through the various Systems Preferences on my devices, cutting out all notifications I deem surplus to requirements
This is deeply ironic, given that the reminder itself pings me via a notification with accompanying “ping” sound and a badge that hangs around until I’ve completed the task!
Each deactivated notification feels, like a kind of threat waiting to return; a dormant volcano of gross, panic-inducing over-stimulation that knows I’m just one glitch away from being engulfed again. And I have to put in so much manual work just to stay up-to-date. Additionally, I seem to have created a new kind of worry (“FOMO”) in the sense that, each time I scroll past one of the unfollowed (hundreds of YouTube channels I’ve unsubscribed or Twitterers I’ve set to “only notify of Live/TV stream” etc), I perform the momentary re-evaluation as to whether I’d been right in relegating them to silence. The snowball of those accummulating re-evaluations, like snoozing for the thousandth time an email you simply can’t bear to read (when it could’ve been handled in a matter of minutes and yet has taken a collective hour of your life in re-scannings and re-snoozings), keeps me up nights, with imaginings of the avalanche of stress it represents.
In the course of developing Nanny* (first deployed in 2019) I have found the best way to fundamentally alter my dependence on the notifications ecosystem (in which, as a plugged-in tech worked on the 2020s, I can’t help but abide) is to switch to what I’ve termed “anti-algorithmic” systems. As one member of the Teats-N-Treats product suite, Nanny’s raison d'être is the re-empowering of the user, who is able to manually configure all aspects of their chosen set of reminders for tasks, chores, events, etc.
Far from simply “yet another to-do app”,† Nanny has seen me through 2 years of managing so many projects, household activities, birthdays, holidays… and yes, the Coronavirus pandemic.
In this series of posts I’ll be demonstrating some of its most useful features and providing transparent commentary as to what we’ve planned for it, here at TNT.
[*] The link is to a “development” server whose address and availability are in constant flux; please use a Medium comment below, to notify me of any outages encountered.
[†] I’m amazed that, from a quick Google, I can’t find anyone having taken advantage of the “YA” prefix in tech acronyms to create a to-do app called “Yata” or similar. Might reserve this as a name for Nanny, e.g. in territories where for some reason the term “Nanny” is undesirable for some reason.
