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by Aaron Brady.
Original Post: Good Notifications
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Hating notifications is all the rage, I’ve done it myself: I huff at
people who break off mid-conversation to see who’s retweeted
them; my wife’s phone and tablet sound loudly if someone on the
Internet says her name. (Possibly in front of a mirror? I’m not sure how
this works)
But I’ve recently noticed an unproductive habit: checking and
rechecking web sites and applications. You could label it
fear of missing out, and it is, but it’s also because for my
job I have a mixture of job roles that can be broadly defined as two
things:
Getting lost in deep thought: Dig into errant programs in GDB. Hold the
context of IOS routers and network diagrams in my head. Trace
tricky race conditions and untangle failing tests. Write and
copy-edit various documentation, blog posts and marketing material.
Reacting immediately: Answering support calls from
customers. Dealing with a site outage or a failed router. Restoring
something from a backup now. Unscheduled meetings. Failures of
planning on other people’s parts.
I really want to like the first type of work, it’s the most fulfilling
in the long term, but like most people, I find it really easy to fall
into the trap of doing lots of the second kind of work. I feel the
dopamine kick of getting something done, even if the thing was as
trivial as a DNS update a customer asked for in a ticket.
More responsibly, I don’t want to be the guy who dives deep into his
own work and ignores the support calls, tickets and fires that spring
up. We don’t have a top-down structure- everyone grabs their own fair
share of the support burden, so if I don’t pay attention then other
people have to pick up my slack. That’s not fair.
In an effort to get more of the first type of work done, I turned off
lots of notifications. I didn’t run a Twitter client in the background,
have pop-ups from email, receive alerts from the ticket
system, or have my IM client flash to get my attention.
I worked in a full screen terminal or text editor, Getting Stuff Done.
Nirvana. Perfect. Exactly how “distraction free” working is supposed
to work.
Except that, with no status notifications, I couldn’t resist
Cmd-Tabbing every few minutes to see if I’d missed a conversation in
our group chat, or an important ticket update or an email from a big
customer. (Our alerting dashboard is on my desk, and has
sound, so I didn’t have to worry about missing that)
The less progress I was making on the big thing, the more frequently I
distracted myself by polling.
This week’s self-experiment has been to turn notifications back on-
the right ones, at least.
I wear a watch so that I don’t lose track of time in a full-screen
window, but so that I don’t switch apps just to see the clock on my
computer.
Adium notifies me of every conversation with a pop up. I can glance
and decide not to take action but, as long as I’m at my desk, it’s
pretty hard for me to miss what’s going on.
The team I’m in have tweaked our alerting further: it goes off less
and when it does, it’s usually serious. Alerting fatigue had crept back
in to the system without us really noticing it. Considering that
I gave a talk on this subject I feel bad for not acting
sooner.
The important part of turning notifications on again is that if
nothing is popping up then nothing is happening, and I don’t have a reason
to pull myself away from my work to check on it.
It’s going well, even though it’s just been a few days. The pendulum
will probably swing back and I’ll have to dial down the notifications
at some point, but some of that can be dealt with by caring about
fewer things.
It may be that I’m aware of too much, and it takes an excess of
notifications to make me realise.
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