In almost every book on productivity the authors insist that social networks, messengers and the internet in general are very harmful for us. It's hard to disagree. Not only do they generate extra anxiety when you read this or that news, they also simply take away time that you could spend more usefully. The simplest method everyone recommends is to switch off all notifications and only read (check) social networks and messengers when you have planned it and set aside time. You can go further and not only disable notifications but cut off the internet entirely, hide your gadgets or put them far away. A pretty radical method, isn't it? Our CEO Vitaly has long practised this notification-off approach and recommends it. As a whole the method is good, but there is one nuance: it doesn't suit everyone. In particular it doesn't suit people whose work is directly tied to the internet. For example, those who are directly responsible for every minute of downtime of a given online project. If it isn't obvious yet — I mean myself. As CTO in our company I must avoid outages and failures in our projects. And if a failure does happen for whatever reason, I have to restore operation as quickly as possible. A one-minute outage is lost money for the company. So if I switch off the internet and messenger notifications, I lose real-time contact with notification systems and bots that constantly monitor our projects. Unlike sysadmins, who also have access to metrics and real-time indicators, bots don't need sleep, food or a personal life. Bots and automatic monitoring systems signal whenever they detect a problem. Of course such alerts don't arrive every day or even every week. It's rare, but when it happens I'm one of the first to know and can act quickly. So disconnecting from the internet to enjoy life is a good recommendation — but only for some people.
Let's dig a little deeper into this situation and see whether there are other ways to deal with distraction from notifications and, as a result, the huge amount of time we give to social networks and messengers. The advice to switch off notifications or even the internet usually stems from two reasons:
1) Some people have too little willpower to resist notifications and immediately reach for the reply or to open a post.
2) Notifications as such pull you away from work and kill concentration.
Let's look at both reasons in more detail. Yes, for many people it's genuinely hard to see a notification and not open the message. And it doesn't matter whether it's from a real person or just a post from some group or channel. First, turn off all notifications from channels you follow (hopefully there aren't that many) and leave only notifications from real people. Then train your willpower: don't get distracted by messages and don't give in to the urge to open messages from friends, relatives or colleagues when they can wait. And almost 99 out of 100 messages really can wait. In extreme cases you can temporarily mute even the most persistent contacts during working hours.
The second reason — loss of concentration — is more debatable. It can happen that someone decides to pour out their heart to you and sends message after message over several minutes. Mute such people for a few hours; these regular messages really do reduce concentration and effectiveness. A temporary notification blackout will do you good. In one productivity book I read the claim that it takes a person around 20 minutes to get back into the context of a task after an interruption. That sounds absurd. Perhaps that figure comes from a study on sloths from Zootopia. Twenty minutes are needed only if the task is complex and you've been away from it for a week. It's far more logical to assume that the time to regain context is proportional to how long you were away. If you were working on something important and glanced at a notification, it doesn't mean you need 20 minutes to get back to work. Usually it takes a few seconds, at worst tens of seconds. Even if you got pulled into a short exchange with a colleague, you'll need at most a minute to return to the task. Of course constantly switching focus from one task to another is not ideal. But if you only look away for a second or two, your effectiveness doesn't suffer — provided you have enough willpower not to dive into the conversation. On top of that, you should train your willpower not only with visible notifications but also with the number of unread messages shown as a badge somewhere on the screen. Perfectionists find this especially hard — they want that badge to be zero. That's not me at all. I see nothing wrong with a large number of unread messages showing next to a messenger, and I recommend you also stop caring.
To wrap up, I'll restate my attitude to turning off notifications in social networks and messengers. If your willpower is weak and every time you see a message you reach to read and reply, then you really are better off switching notifications off or putting your gadgets away so you can learn to enjoy life.
