Notifications are evil. Kill them

How do you feel about the fact that the services are constantly trying to tell you something through their very annoying notification systems? I am very bad and try to limit and disable them in every possible way. I offer you an interesting opinion by Clay Johnson, author of the book "The Information Diet", about the nature of notifications in popular services and the reasons why they need to be urgently disabled immediately.

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How many notifications do you receive per hour? Let's think critically about these constant requests for your attention: what do they really mean? Who makes them? Before writing my book "Information Diet", I received about 10 notifications per hour — one every 6 minutes.

First, let's define the concept of "notifications". In the context of our conversation, notification is something that generates the service you use, which, in his opinion, is valuable to you. For example, the red rectangle at the top corner of each Google page tells you that something has happened on Google+. The message you receive from Twitter tells you that you have received a new message. The tray icon tells you that you have new e-mail messages. Facebook* Facebook* doesn't let you forget about what happened on facebook* — for example, that someone has posted a photo on Instagram*.

Why do we get them? Why are our phones constantly demanding our attention? Maybe because there are really important things happening for me somewhere?

Of course not. We receive so many notifications only for the reason that the companies that rule the web today are involved in a war for our attention. They call it "user engagement" and fight for it. The result of capturing our attention is the time spent on the service and the number of advertising messages that we can view. These notifications are not valuable in any way to distract your attention. They are simply created so that you spend half of your day on the service that creates them. This is evil.

For me personally, the most terrible thing Google has done all the time is this red rectangle on the search results page (ed.: how to disable notifications in Google+). Now every Google search tells me: "We know that you are in the process of searching for something, but we think that it will be very interesting for you to know that someone you don't know has started reading you on Google+. So we made the rectangle bright red so that it became the most noticeable element of the page and now you won't miss it. Just so you know." Google is not doing this because Google+ has really valuable or relevant information for you that requires my immediate reaction. If this were the case, then Google would give us control over what is happening in this red rectangle or allow us to disable it in a regular way. But no, they're only doing it because they want me to use Google+ more and more. So they will be able to say in their reports that they have increased "user engagement on Google+" and earned their Christmas bonuses.

In fact, all these notifications, apart from the fact that they absolutely do not respect your attention, do another terrible thing — they train us to be passive consumers of information. If we cannot control the notifications that fall on us, then we just have to respond to them — both to the red Google+ rectangle and to the offers of the coupon service to remove the hair on the back with wax. If we leave everything as it is, then we are helping to develop a new economy of targeted attention eaters, in which the best minds of our time spend their lives understanding how to make us click on their command and give the remaining attention, spending our lives on it. Imagine if they could focus on distracting our attention only to the content that is really worth our attention.

Do yourself a favor and kill all notifications. Don't participate in the notification economy. Become not a passive consumer, but a creator. Instead of trusting Facebook* how to distract your attention again, schedule a valuable meeting with it. If Facebook* is still important to you, then schedule 15 minutes in your calendar for it and spend all that time there. No more. Remove anything that creates information noise and tries to throw you off balance.

The only irreplaceable resource you have is time. The next time someone asks for your attention, remember - you are actually paying.

Thank you for paying part of your time for reading this material. We hope that this is a successful investment.

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