Notification is Everywhere
Notification is everywhere. It’s in your social media, email inbox, messaging app, workplace messenger, and so on and so forth. We open up the apps when there is any new notification, but we do so even when there is no notification. We unconsciously open them up with a hope to see any new notification. I call this ‘notification dopamine.’ (*Caveat: I am not using this term with any scientific evidence.)
Over the past several years, these notifications have gotten deep inside of my work life as well as my personal life. Back in the days, Outlook was my only source of notifications at work. None of the other tools that I used generated any sort of notifications because it was all offline desktop apps. These days, I am swamped with notifications from a bunch of SaaS tools that I use at work– Notion, Slack, etc.
One of the best things about this new generation of productivity tools is the collaboration capabilities. In these tools, no one should work in a file on their desktop. Everything is on the cloud and accessible to anyone. Changes can be made synchronously and made public in real time. And most importantly, anyone can notify someone or be notified. In this environment, however, notifications just become your daily norm of communicating with others. The workplace culture that has shifted towards a more remote-based model also contributed to this. Instead of tapping on someone’s shoulder in the office, now we tag them in the tools we use.
Notification is Disruptive
I have realized my brain is trapped in notifications in a way that they started to dictate my behaviors. They immediately draw my attention even when I have other priorities. It sometimes disrupted my discipline, and this required another type of discipline to control my own attention to them. So yes, like some other people, I started to periodically turn off the notifications from my work messenger during the day, not to mention after work hours and over the weekend, in order to control where I put my attention. This is the most obvious evidence of our addiction to notification dopamine and us having a hard time controlling it without the help of turning it off entirely.
I guess this is exactly how social media such as Instagram or Twitter drives our desires and behaviors. Similar to these social media, workplace notifications also create anxiety in our minds. With a bunch of unread notifications, you might feel busy and strongly wanted. Without them, on the other hand, you might feel like you are not busy enough and sometimes you even feel unwanted. (which is obviously not always true.) The number of notifications you get can affect your feeling and morale and you constantly check your inbox and Slack to wait for notifications.
Another danger behind the notification dopamine is that it allows others to indirectly control the way I spend my own time. I can be pinged or tagged by someone and get looped in any unexpected conversation at any time. It has such an accumulative effect on how I spend my most valuable resource; time. If I keep chasing the dopamine by constantly responding to notifications, eventually I will lose control over my time.
Notification is Just a Tool
Luckily, I have seen some of my colleagues be extremely good at maintaining their own discipline to handle both notifications they get and their own to-do lists. Also, notification can be a really powerful thing in fostering a highly collaborative work culture. The value that I found is that it incentivizes me to help my team whenever they need me. Helping and supporting my team is one of the biggest joys in my professional life and the faster I get my notifications, the more I can help others.
At the end of the day, notification is just a tool to communicate with others. Our history has always been progressing in a way that individuals are more and more connected and communication gets easier. Notification is just another tool that enables more connectivity. It is up to us to find a wise way of making the most out of it while not losing our discipline to control the abundance of behavioral triggers around us.