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Being bombarded by notifications interferes with your productivity. Here are the alerts you should skip and those notifications you can’t live without.
You’re foolish if you think alerts are appropriate and productive.
Sometimes, we need someone who will be square with us about our weaknesses. And while it may feel mean or hurtful to be called out, there is no compassion in letting others stumble and struggle.
Sure, some alerts are necessary, but beyond those few notifications, every chime, ding, buzz, and hum is destroying your productivity and mental well-being.
You can justify your actions all day, but there’s a reason why giant corporations like Apple, Google, and Meta spend billions each year training us to obey each ding like one of Pavlov’s dogs at dinner time.
When setting up notifications on your devices, ask yourself, “Is this serving you?”
Are these seemingly small notifications helping you build the life and the type of business that you want?
Paying the price
You’re paying a price for every notification that comes across your devices. You may feel like you’re being super productive with each little dopamine hit. But those tech companies are throwing endless resources into keeping you distracted and focused on your screens.
People tell me that alerts don’t affect them. But they are lying to themselves – and I’m guilty of this, too.
I recently worked with a team member who was adamant that the alerts didn’t have any impact.
We walked through a video call where her screen was shared so she could explain a new process to me. While presenting, alerts would come up on my team member’s computer, and she’d stop mid-sentence to read the notification.
I could see her look at the notification, check it, pause, then say, “Oh, where was I? Oh, yes,” and return to the presentation.
I was on mute and intentionally didn’t say anything to see if she would pick up on her behavior because we’d just talked about how damaging alerts are.
After being derailed for the fifth or sixth time, my team member looked up at me and said, “Holy crap! These are distracting me. I had never noticed how these notifications pulled me off track.”
And those were just the alerts she was paying attention to right now!
Alerts are intended to distract you – that’s what alerts are. By design, they grab your attention and pull you out of your focus to tell you about something else. Not all alerts are indeed damaging. There are some you absolutely need.
For example, I want my smoke detector to catch my attention. I would like to know if my house was on fire. I want my focus to be broken.
I also want to know if my wife calls; that’s a high-priority communication that deserves my undivided attention.
Beyond those, though, 95% of daily digital alerts should be turned off.
Just turn them off
To run a multi-million-dollar practice and deliver massive value to your clients, your time cannot be spent managing meaningless alerts. You’ll never get to a high level of productivity unless you cut these distractions out of your life.
When you go up against alerts, you’ll face one of the biggest superpowers the universe has ever seen. It's not a conspiracy theory that billions are spent yearly to keep your phone in your hand. It's just a fact.
Thinking you can ignore these buzzing notifications isn’t a reality. We wouldn’t need this conversation if willpower were enough.
You could say you need to be stronger, but you’re not.
You’re not dependable. So, let’s remove the temptation altogether. If you’re the type of person who can’t leave your work email alone if it’s on your phone, then delete it.
Delete your email account from your devices. That doesn’t mean you’ll never do any work from your phone, but you’re going to make a place for it.
Schedule times during the week to review emails with your team.
If you get sucked into online forums and LinkedIn every time you log into your email, set up a computer at a standing desk so that you can’t get comfortable and lapse into mindless browsing.
Alerts worth having
Like anything else, you can take removing alerts and notifications too far. The other day, I met with an advisor who wanted to separate work and personal life, but he needed help with a few issues.
This advisor was adamant that he couldn’t have anything work-related on his phone at all, but he only had one phone. He’d run into issues where he couldn’t access work-related resources like his calendar.
Putting your work calendar on your phone is fair game – it's tough not to have access to that. So much of our lives revolve around our work calendars that you’re just shooting yourself in the foot by omitting that.
Calendar alerts are one of the few notifications I need on my devices. I must know when my appointments are, and a five-minute reminder is a great tool to help me get to my next appointment on time.
A second alert that I absolutely can’t live without is using a timer. It’s incredible how much value I can deliver with this tool because it allows me to focus intensely on my work.
When I don’t use a timer, I struggle to focus on what’s in front of me because I’m constantly looking at the clock, worried that I’ll miss my next appointment.
When I use the timer, I know I have X amount of time and can turn everything off and get to work. When the timer dings, it scares the crud out of me. But I know it's time to shift gears and get to the next thing.
Action Item
Pull out your phone and turn off every damn notification except for phone calls and text messages from your spouse and kids.
You can return and turn on the few alerts you legitimately missed in two weeks. And by “legitimately miss,” I mean any missed notifications that caused a fire in your professional or personal life.
Micah Shilanski, CFP®, is a financial planner who achieves the impossible. Micah is recognized as a leader in the concept of lifestyle design for financial planners and has spoken at conferences across the country. Micah is an advisor with Shilanski and Associates, a founder of Plan Your Federal Retirement, and a co-founder of The Perfect RIA.
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