Managing work distractions by trimming notifications

Notification hell

Over the past few years as I’ve moved through senior developer roles and now into a technical lead role. I have noticed my time becoming more and more disjointed. This of course made it more and more difficult to get into a zone of concentration to get pieces of work completed. It took a while but I eventually noticed that it wasn’t just the extra meetings I was attending or running. Or the extra oversight of more junior peers. Instead the largest disruption was the mountain of notifications from all the various communication applications I was connected to.

The obvious solution is to simply delete all these programs and poof, no more notifications. This doesn’t work so well if I still want to be reachable by junior peers or others that need short notice feedback or something being done. Nor could I just simply turn off all the notifications as that would create the same problem. What I needed was a process that I could apply that would allow high priority things to notify me, medium priority things to be obvious when regularly checked, and everything else to go into the background.

The rules

It took a few months but I eventually came up with a setup that works effectively for me.

What I did was to go through all my communication applications and turn off ALL notifications. From here I then applied a handful of rules to figure out the notifications I would turn back on.

  1. Do I need to respond ASAP?

  2. Do I need to respond in a day or two?

  3. Is this useful to keep up to date with?

Do I need to respond NOW?

For number 1 I thought about the scenarios I wanted to know about immediately. This basically boiled down to any message addressed to me on whatever company platform was being used for daily rapid communication. At my current workplace that meant MS Teams. So I enabled desktop notifications in Teams only for direct messages and threads where I had been tagged. All other notifications remained off. This even included email messages addressed to me. That is because email is not used as a means of fast messaging in the company.

Do I need to respond soonish?

Number 2 is for stuff like threads in MS Teams that I want to be checking regularly to provide rapid help to my team or others. And for messages that need responding to soon but are not so vital as to need handling now. This is where things like creating an email rule for any incoming email where you are not in the To line. Scott Hanselman did a blog post on this over 2 years ago and I know I had been introduced to it even earlier. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/OneEmailRuleHaveASeparateInboxAndAnInboxCCToReduceEmailStressGuaranteed.aspx I also turn on the icon notifications for when an unread email is in the Inbox. As no window popped up or sound played it does not distract me from my topic of concentration. But it does give me a flag to look for when I am ready to check things.

This flows into the next tactic which is hiding any folder, channel, or other tab you don’t need to be checking regularly. So in MS Teams this involves hiding any channel I do not want to be distracted by. It could be a channel used by another team for something not important for me, or might be a group chat that has aged out of usefulness. This can be applied to email programs like Outlook by placing the folders you want to keep track of in the Favourites section.

I will check these applications several times a day looking only for those notifications or hints.

Is this something I just want to keep an eye on?

Finally we have number 3. These could be emails where I have been CC’d to keep me in the loop, company messages about BAU topics, or communications in another team that would be useful to know about. For this I will leave all sorts of notifications turned off. But I will leave the applications running, or folders in places easy to check. I might end up checking these things once a day or only a couple of times a week.

For anything that doesn’t fall under these three rules I will seriously consider just automatically deleting them. For things like Yammer or MS Teams I will just leave the channel or group.

Since applying these rules I’ve gone from dozens of notifications distracting me every day to just a handful. And I have found that relatively few important communications slip between the cracks. You may need to go digging in the settings or do research to find all these options, but the payoff in extra concentration time is worth it.

tl;dr

So, to summarise:

  1. Turn off all notifications

  2. Then turn on specific notifications if the following rules are satisfied

    1. Do I need to respond or know right now?

      • Turn on ALL the noisy notifications. (Pop ups, sounds, animations, etc.)

    2. Do I need to know or respond within 48 hours?

      • Turn on the quiet background notifications. (Icon changes, bolder channels, etc.)

    3. Do I want to stay up to date with this?

      • Leave notifications off, but put the communications in places you will see

    4. Anything else?

      • Consider leaving or deleting