Your Phone Is Your Tool, Not Your Boss - Part 1: Notifications

NOTIFICATIONS

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Notifications are uncontrolled interruptions from your real goals.

They prevent you from ever getting into a flow state.

You should be in control of what you do and when - not your phone.

The brain science behind learning requires sustained focus to trigger myelin growth around active neural pathways.

That’s what brain plasticity is about.

If you go around interrupting that process, however, you’ll never get the myelin growth that locks in what you were learning.

Notifications, essentially, lead to a stunted life.

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Those red dots with the numbers in them cause anxiety, and anxiety causes health problems like heart disease.

Mild anxiety was actually shown to increase mortality by 20% over a ten year period.

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Here's What To Do:

1. Open the Apple Settings App, then go to the Notifications Section.

2. Go app by app, and turn off (almost) all notifications.

No notifications is best, but at least turn badges off.

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The very few reasons to leave notifications ON for a particular app are:

• For delivery apps. These notifications are supposed to only come when you want them to, like when you’re standing on the corner trying to get a Lyft. Apps that fall in this category include: Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Grubhub, Caviar.

• If you get very few text messages, leave banners on. You’ll actually end up seeing most of your text messages on your home screen as they come in, because you’re setting your phone up to have very few notifications. The unread badge for messages is just extra anxiety about messages you already saw. If you get lots of text messages, then turn off all notifications and treat text messages like an email inbox that you only check at set intervals.

• Leave notifications on for your calendar app.

• Leave notifications on for your Maps apps: Maps and Google Maps, they only notify you when you’re actively getting directions.

• Consider turning notifications off for phone calls and updating your voicemail to have the caller text or email you, or you can leave notifications on.

• For all the notifications that you left on, go back and make sure badges are turned off. Badges are those red dots with numbers in them that create anxiety that there’s something important going on in that app (you’ll literally live longer if you never see another badge).