Is your phone flooded with notifications?

In our recent air travel, we observed a strange thing, i.e., the sound of multiple notification tones after the pilot’s safety instruction to switch off flight mode in mobile phones when our plane landed in the destination airport. It must have happened to you as well. If you are not sure, try to observe in your next trip.

Don’t take break from Distraction, take break from Focus. -Deep Work.

A similar situation arise when we switch on the internet after some break, like every morning when we just start using mobile phones. Notifications of different applications start to flow suddenly or intermittently throughout the days while using mobile phones with internet. Then, we start responding to some of these notifications and get busy with mobile phones.

How does this one small feature make us shallow consumers?

In the abundance of data, we are often notified with some updates or other in our mobile phones. Then, we act upon these notifications and switch immediately to shallow activities by repeated actions. These cycles start with fewer seconds, minutes, but last more than we ever imagine. We invest quite some valuable time, mostly for entertainment, fear of missing out emotion, and less on reflection. We are busy, but not productive.

Where to check this sunk cost?

So, these notifications trigger us to engage more and eat up the majority of our valuable asset i.e. Time. It is like sunk cost, which can’t be abandoned easily, although it has little value. Using digital well-being footprint, We can easily track this loss per day, month, and where we lost them. These mostly include dopamine driven products created by well-known tech companies.

Do you know what is digital well-being? Then checkout this, Digital Well being:Know your Digital Live Balance

To thrive in Digital Ecosystem, be a Producer. -Hooked

How do tech companies design such habit forming products?

Most tech companies use notification as a catalyst in their product design to create a habit in end users’ daily routine. Two main two aspects related to these notifications  are 1) Choice Architecture, 2) Emotional Trigger.

Choice Architecture:

Context or environment matters a lot for any product to be viral. These notifications are accessible with only one action, i.e., scroll from top to down in our mobile phone irrespective of screen. No hassle in access, unlike other mobile applications such as Digital Wellbeing app in android mobile phones, which we need to explicitly search to access or scroll to different screen. We act on those things which are positioned in front of our eyes and easily accessible.

Eye Level is Buy Level.

Emotional Trigger:

Products are designed to use human emotions like Anticipation and Social belongings. And to be more specific, negative emotions like FOMO, boredom, etc. with messages like “You are dropped out of the top 10!”, “Flat **% Sale offer” etc. Once we act on these notifications, Tech companies get the opportunity to engage us with more similar content. More we get engaged, more they control our behavior, cycle keep going on and on.

All this starts, when we have enabled “Allowed” or “Turn on” the notification without a second thought during installation of product in our own ecosystem i.e mobile phones.

What happens when we switch between different tasks?

Multitasking is not productive for our brain. When we do a single (hard) task for a long time without switching the context, it takes less time as we are less distracted with the minimum attention residue. But when our brain switches from, let’s say, Task-A to Task-B and back, our attention doesn’t follow immediately, and we are distracted, which means more attention residue.

Let’s check with the below simple reading exercise. Read first (i.e. numbers) and second (i.e. characters) row one after another, note down the time spent. Then read in pairs in memory, not looking into the picture and note down the time spent. Can you comment which one takes more time?

What will happen if we act on these notifications in settings?

If we disable them explicitly or don’t enable push notifications where it is not necessary, products will start to strangle and request us to turn on the notification with pop up messages like “Don’t miss the latest video”, “Get Latest information” etc. With less distraction, we will be less entertained by dopamine driven products and spend more time to focus driven activities. Choice is Ours.

Do you know, how did one ship engine shutdown trigger WWI? Then check out here Book: Same as ever.