Turn off all notifications

And get shit done.

A number of years ago, I turned off all notifications for all apps, email, and Slack. So neither on my desktop nor my phone do I get any notifications whatsoever for anything. The only exception to this is messages from my partner.

I have a role with a lot of responsibilities. I have two small kids, and yet over the past years, nothing has happened that made me consider turning notifications back on. What I’m saying is, you can probably turn off all notifications and the world is not going to end.

Rarely are things both urgent and important

One thing I see a lot professionally is that people become driven by Slack notifications. They get a notification, they respond to it, they go to the channels that they have unread messages in, they read them, and then they go to the next channel. This is an incredibly inefficient way of spending your time.

Because really what you’re doing is you’re letting other people’s activity and communication drive your behavior. Now, of course, you have to read some messages and reply to something that somebody sends to you. However, the vast majority of things are not urgent nor important. And so things that are not urgent and important, you are fine not replying, reading, or otherwise engaging with those things.

Even things that are important but not urgent don’t need you to act on them right away.

The alternative is: you make a plan before you look at any notification or any unread message. A plan for your day. These are the things that I’m going to do: A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, whatever. And then you go do those things. And maybe between A and B, you have to kill some time, or you’re going to have a coffee, or you need a break. This is a great time to look at those unread messages and reply to them.

Semi-urgent things

In a work setting, there are things that are semi-urgent. In other ways, there’s some expectation that you reply to a particular notification within a particular time window. You probably know which things they are and where they come from. Rather than relying on notifications that get you out of the flow, you just semi-regularly check into those things.

For example, at Remote, we have a channel for a particular project that I care very much about and that I’m very much involved with that has a particular deadline. What I do is, instead of having notifications on for that channel, I check it once in a while. For example, after I complete a task, or when I feel like procrastinating for a bit (which is a totally normal thing to do), or maybe when I’ve just gotten a coffee. Those are the right times to check on semi-urgent things, and you still get the benefit of being somewhat responsive, but because you’re not being interrupted by the notification pulling you out whatever your current focus is on, but rather driven by your own intent to check on something, this is a slight upgrade.

Super urgent things

If you do this really well, you also gain the magical ability of making an exception. You can make exceptions for actual super urgent things, meaning things that require immediate attention and are so important that it’s worth interrupting any task or any activity that you’re doing at any given moment.

A good example for this is if you are an engineer that is on call, meaning you are the person that’s responsible for making sure that if a system goes down, you bring it back up or you do the things required to bring it back up. This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to treat as super urgent. And the beauty is that if you have killed all other notifications, you know that when you’re going to get a notification, this is something worth spending time on.