It's 11:00pm on Sunday and I'm in bed drifting off into dreamworld when Ding! The sound of my phone receiving an instant message. Ugh! I forgot to turn the sound off.
The preview window on my phone's homepage shows me the first few words: Hey, I just sent you an email...
Dude! really?
You IM'ed me to tell me you sent me an email about work? which I'm not doing right now because it's 11pm on a Sunday?
The next day, 9:00am... Ding! client #2 Hey man, Just wanted to remind you about my appointment on Wednesday.
Yes. You'r appointment was confirmed in writing by the person in charge of confirming appointments in writing. It's not something I do.
A few minutes later... Ding!
client #3 Hey man, U busy rn? Was wondering if I could get an update on that song you guys are editing.
Oh come on! the person who is working on that is not me and has given you a delivery date which is next week. Why are you IM'ing me about it at 9:00am??
FTS!
enough is enough!
Notifications OFF motherlovers! how do you like me now??
BEST
DECISION
EVER!
At first I thought my friends would get angry at me; maybe loose some clients too. But as days went by, and I only check my WhatsApp messages in free spaces in my schedule, I realized This thing has been such a distraction all along.
While I'm at it, let me archive all these useless group chats too.
Then I came to yet another realization! WhatsApp is DESIGNED to distract you!
- There's no way to separate the important messages from the trivial
- You can't shut off broadcast messages
- You can't put contacts into categories
and I'm tired of it.
I'm the captain of my communication now
I'm amazed at how this little modification to my behavior has had such an impact in my productivity.
I have longer periods of deep work, I feel more present at dinner parties with my friends, clients are using asynchronous communication more, I'm spending way less time in meme-ridden group chats.
I love it and couldn't recommend it more.
There are a bunch of privacy reasons why you may want to consider quitting this app too, and if you'd like to read up on that, here's a link to an article about it:
But from a productivity and focus standpoint I think it's a huge win.
What do I do about instant messaging with my work team? well, I'm glad you asked. There are a bunch of tools out there that are way better for instant communication. We decided to go with Slack.
It integrates with Google Calendar, Monday.com, Asana, and even our note-taking app, Notion. You can open different topic channels, set reminders for specific conversations, nested threads, run polls, send cloud-based video with screen-sharing. This thing is super powerful and would highly recommend you check it out.
What's next?
Well, after I saw the disproportionate positive effect this little tweak had on my productivity, I started exploring all kinds of time-management, scheduling, note-taking tools out there. I'm even picking up exercise, improving my diet and working on my financial goals too :)
And it all got started with turning those pesky notifications off.
If you're like me and want to take control of your life, or improve your productivity a bit, give this little hack a try. Who knows, you might find out it works for you too.
Image sources:
https://www.dailyrepublic.com/all-dr-news/wires/business/one-ring-phone-scam-comes-in-middle-of-night-luring-you-into-costly-callback/
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/16329676/reasons-quit-whatsapp-facebook-outage-app-offline/
https://slack.com/intl/es-gt/scale