How to Silence the Persistent Ding of Modern Life
8 notification types to disable for increased productivity
The ding of an incoming email used to give me a panic attack. Who was it? What did they want? Did I need to drop everything and answer them?
Of course I did. They expected it. I was providing good customer service by dropping all my work, interrupting my flow, and telling them the thing they wanted to know, even if they could have figured it out on their own.
Then, I’d turn my attention back to my interrupted task and — ding! — they’d fired off a reply to my reply, starting the cycle all over again.
At the time, I was working from home, trying to be a one-woman editing and entrepreneurial machine. My short-term solution was to put my dinging device in another room while I worked. But clearly, this wasn’t sustainable. And my productivity was suffering.
I thought the problem was me: I just needed to get better at multitasking. I needed to be calmer about getting interrupted, so that my chest wouldn’t tighten and my breath wouldn’t catch every time I heard that distinctive ding.
The true problem, though, was that I was trying to do the impossible. Humans cannot, in fact, multitask.
Emails should be seen and…
