I suppose that there are two extremes of how you could feasibly live your life in this digital age:

Obviously there's a spectrum between these, but if you don't fiddle much with settings, these are the likely scenarios.

Until recently, I was definitely following closer to the Second Way of Life. I'd leave my phone on my table facedown as I worked on assignments or things for work. My phone would buzz and vibrate for each time you, my dear reader, messaged me, and I would valiantly attempt to ignore it. Sometimes, I'd make the mistake of leaving my phone face up and I'd see the screen light up in my peripheral vision with the promises of information yet unseen.

Even if I wanted to ignore my phone, thanks to the power of iCloud™, I'd still have those same notifications mirrored on my computer and iPad. [1] So there was really no escaping it.

As much as I would love to convince myself that I remained just as productive even in these circumstances, there's just no way that's true. It's pretty well understood in the neurobehavioral research community that each time your attention is broken by any disturbance, it takes your brain quite a bit of time to return to the task at hand.

It probably takes around 10-15 minutes to get fully immersed in a task to begin with. But it's all too easy to be interrupted every minute if you're not careful, so you may rarely achieve that immersion.

Modern society is designed in such a way as to distract you at every second from doing your tasks. Basically every single digital product or interaction that we have is carefully engineered to capture as much of your attention as possible.  For some godforsaken reason, every single app and website nowadays asks you if you want to turn on push notifications. [2]

It can be tempting to leave this setting on by default. After all, what if you're just about to receive an urgent communication from a far-off prince who offers you $10M if you're willing to help him purchase a single measly Bitcoin? It would be such a tragedy to miss this sort of Golden Opportunity™.

In reality, you're not likely to miss basically anything of real importance 99.99% of the time. And what you lose in focus and productivity from leaving these persistent interruptions on far outweighs any benefits you gain from instantaneous asynchronous communication.

It's actually a bit ironic that push notifications were sort of initially marketed towards helping you be more productive. The idea was that you could take care of things as soon as they popped up, and you could be notified of pressing events right when you needed to be. As with all things in life, there are good and bad versions of this.

Maybe you get a push notification about potentially fraudulent activity on your credit card. Great, you can address that immediately and avoid a lot of headache later. [3]

But on the other hand, do you really need to know that Jack Shmippen from high school whom you haven't spoken with in 10 years just liked your Instagram photo of you standing on a yacht with the caption "They say mo' money, mo' problems. I'm still waiting for the problems 😎"? Probably not the most pressing thing in your life right now. [4]

The most concerning issues arise when your brain starts to treat every notification as equally important. I know we think of ourselves as a Superior Species, but we're really just glorified monkeys at the end of the day. If we don't take care to direct our thoughts, they're sure to fixate indiscriminately on every new stimulus. [5]

So ultimately, I think it comes down to balance. Phone manufacturers have started to understand the need for fewer digital distractions and have introduced many features to put people back in control of their attention. I, for one, have tried my best recently to really make use of these features.

The simplest thing to do, of course, is to just turn off all notifications. But this is a crude way of approaching your attention, because like I mentioned above, there are certainly things that you might want to be notified of. And besides, getting notified when your friends text you is not inherently a negative thing. 

But we can be a bit more selective about when these notifications are allowed to pass into our attention. In my case, I've silenced most apps on my phone entirely. This means turning off the vibration in the settings, and also turning off push notifications for basically every app that isn't either financial or a messaging app. And even for the messaging apps, I've set much stricter Focus Modes to restrict my attention to messages that need my immediate attention.

This also paradoxically lets me toggle my phone to non-silent mode most of the time. By this, I mean that phone calls still come through and actually ring out loud (instead of just buzzing). And that's because the only people who would reasonably contact me by phone are likely my parents or my brother, and that really could be an emergency. This also allows me to leave my phone across the room or in a drawer somewhere, because I know that it'll make noise when necessary.

Anyway, this newsletter is really running long and I'm not here to prescribe rules on how you should live your life. All I'm saying is that it may be a good idea to take a closer look at what steals your attention every day, and make sure that you're spending your thoughts on what you want to be spending them on. Don't let Mark zucc all of the focus out of your life. That would be a real tragedy.

Here are some songs that I like to listen to that are pleasant but help me get in the zone when I'm working. They're actually even good on repeat since they have the correct amount of movement and sound choices to fade satisfyingly into the background. Some Soundcloud offerings in here because those songs can't be found on Spotify, but they're also some of my favorites from this week. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

More - Cosmonaut Grechko
Soundcloud | YouTube

Cartolina da Bordighera - Dalo [6]
Soundcloud

Night Time Blues - Castelluzzo
Spotify | YouTube

Wildcat - Ratatat
Spotify | YouTube

See you all next Sunday!

suhaas
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Here are Spotify and YouTube playlists with all the songs so far.

[1] I'm a real Apple fanboy, can you tell? At this point the sunk cost is so high that I really hope they keep making products for a while. Otherwise, I'm pretty screwed.

[2] Why would ANYONE at any time or place need a push notification from Business Insider or Kohl's?? Speaking of Kohl's, I feel like it would be funny if someone made the next big cryptocurrency and named it Kohl's Cash, in honor of the New Gold Standard of the world. It should also be mapped 1:1 to the amount of Kohl's Cash you actually own of course.

[3] You can't afford to ruin your credit score while the Prince needs your help, after all.

[4] Fire caption though. And can I ride on your yacht sometime? I can bring my problems so we can complete the picture.

[5] I think this is what leads us to compulsively interrupt our own tasks to pursue something trivial. Any time you have any question or thought or doubt or even just a small break, it's easy to hit CMD + t to open up a new tab and browse to your heart's content. Or better yet, just pick up your phone and look at all of the notifications and funny otter videos that are only a Face ID away. And the Internet certainly has no lack of content for you to consume, so a short break can quickly turn into a 34-minute mental vacation. Minimizing these unintended mental vacations is probably best.

[6] This is one of my favorite songs of all time. For working, for driving, for just about any occasion. Except for playing at a rave or a party or maybe a bar mitzvah. YMMV though. Also the most exclusive one on the list since it's not even on YouTube!