Jo Cribb has had it with being interrupted, diverted, distracted and made dumber by her constant companion
I love working from working from home. In my wee office, I dream of how to spend the fortune I am saving in not buying black stockings. I love how I can get the washing done between meetings and have perfected the cheese toastie.
But it means you sit there all day next to me pinging away.
Over two intense work-days last week, jammed with Slack, LinkedIn, text, and emails, I worked out just how bad you are for me. You had me in your toxic grip. I could only work in 10 second bursts before you summoned me back, dragging me off task.
So, phone notifications: we need to end this now.
Whether it’s that innocent rocking of the phone, tiny ping or flicking red circle, I am officially turning you off (well at least, now and then).
You have been stealing my attention. There is a reason why I can’t concentrate as well as I used to. It’s you, not me.
I am not alone. Microsoft Corp claims that the average human attention space has dropped to just eight seconds (down from 12 seconds in 2000). That’s famously the same as goldfish.
As Jenny Odell points out in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, while all those apps and social media platforms are free to use in terms of dollars, the actual cost to us is high. They are using ‘persuasion design techniques’ to steal our precious waking hours.
She reckons they hack our natural desire to connect with each other, to feel valued and trap us in a fearful present. She recommends we do more daydreaming, plan time to doing nothing each day and hide in a cabin in the woods.
I heard author Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention) on the radio a few months ago. He reckons our brains are wired to only do one thing at a time. When we switch between activities our brains need to reconfigure, which costs us time and performance.
That’s not me, I remember smugly thinking. I am the queen of multi-tasking, as I put the fly spray in the fridge and milk in the pot drawer.
Hari quotes research that showed students who received texts during an exam performed 20 percent worse than those who didn’t. Most of us are losing 20 percent of our brainpower almost all the time, he concludes.
See, notifications, you are bad for me.
You steal my attention away from things that matter more to me than telling me that some random person just posted something. You slow down my thinking every time I look at you, and make me tired. You make me 20 percent less brainy and, heaven forbid, I need all my brain cells working for me all the time.
Farewell, notifications.
And let’s not be friends either.
