If you really want to be notified when you get emails (really?!), then consider turning off your email app while you focus on something more important, then turn it back on when you’re finished. When you look at your laptop/desktop screen, are you faced with a sea of distracting red dots on your app icons, representing unread emails, instant messages and social media messages? If these dots and numbers – which are designed to grab your attention – are preventing you from focusing on your priorities, consider turning them off.ģ.
#Gif machine that goes ping how to#
Here’s how to customize notifications on iPhone and iPad and here’s how to do it on Android devices.Ģ. Most modern phones let you distinguish between visual notifications and audio ones.
Many apps have notifications turned on as a default, so go to your settings and turn them off. Turn off notifications on as many of your phone’s apps as you can. Some things you might like to consider, in an effort to reduce distractions:ġ. If it’s a given that we’re all going to continue using our machines that go ping (trademark pending), then our job is to ensure that the pinging doesn’t impact on our focus. Does your job require this? Or do you just like the thrill of checking new messages? So, what can you do? However, if you find yourself reflexively reaching for your mobile phone every time it makes a noise, or switching apps on your laptop every time you see a notification, you’re unintentionally sabotaging your own productivity and spreading your limited attention all over the place in the process.īe honest with yourself and ask if you really need instant notifications every time you get an email, instant message, social media mention and so on. Perhaps you’re immune to the various beeps and bloops emanating from your various devices. Only you can answer this question for yourself. In fact, it seems like most modern work environments have been designed to grab our attention in multiple competing directions, not allow us to channel our focus productively. Factor in our in-built need for novelty and you’ve designed a distraction engine! Most people have multiple connected devices these days.Īnd if you consider just how many apps on each of the computers can send a ‘Ping!’, it’s not hard to visualise a workday dominated by near-automatic responses to pings and bleeps, all designed to get our attention immediately. I don’t think this makes me some kind of tech-heavy outlier. All of which could, if I let them, interrupt my focus with various notifications. I’ve just had a quick look at my desk and there’s an iPhone, an iPad and my desktop computer. Does anyone else remember the scene in Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning of Life’, when the hospital administrator admires the new ‘Machine that goes Ping!’ in the operating theatre?Ī couple of recent, accidental activations of my desktop Amazon Echo in the office (thanks, Alexa) got me thinking about all the other sources of interruption and distraction we surround ourselves with at work.
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