A pilsner, please

Hey bartender, how are things on your end? My day's been very busy at work. I've spent my entire time on meetings and I don't feel like I brought much value. I realized today how many notifications I get throughout the day. My phone keeps vibrating all the time and it makes it hard to focus. I get this anxiety when I stop looking at my phone for a while, what if I miss some important things?

Maybe the most annoying part is that this phone stays with me the whole time. Days, night, when I'm working or when I'm not. In a way, I never really disconnect. It feels wrong, but that's what I've been doing for a while. I'm too scared to stop looking it at it. Disconnecting feels hard.

Anyway, I'll take another beer, please!

In order to work I need to physically separate my device from me. After a an hour or two I retrieve it because it holds ancient knowledge of notifications of hours passed. Funnily enough, when I'm really engrossed in something, I'll forget my phone for stretches of 4 or 5 hours or more. Unfortunately, "engrossed" is not a word I'd use to describe myself at work.

If only there was a device that I could play Spotify from, and use Google Maps on, and text from, and occasionally browse the internet from, and use as an alarm, and todo-list from, and create reminders, and keep all the other useful and flexible functions, without being distracting.

On another note, I don't think I've gone to sleep nor woken up on time since I got my first smartphone in 2015. Could be a coincidence.

starbreaker

I've been there, and I've found that the only why to deal with it is with a firm "No FOMO" policy. I stop all apps from chiming and vibrating, and check for notifications at *my* convenience. I check in whenever I finish a task, or if I think a task will take longer than expected. I block out time in Outlook so people know not to try to drag me into meetings. I'm available at 9:00am in the morning, and cease to be available between 5:00pm and 6:00pm depending on whether I got to take an hour for lunch.

Once I'm off for the day, I turn my company-issued laptop and my phone OFF. If something comes up after hours, tough shit; I never agreed to be on-call, I get my work done in *less than* 40 hours a week (sometimes less than 10 hours a week), and I don't get paid nearly enough to have work intruding upon my private life at odd hours. If something comes up overnight, I'll deal with it in the morning because I make CRUD applications for state governments. Nobody is going to die if a bug in prod that shows up at zero dark thirty doesn't get fixed by nine the next day.

Especially if the bug in prod is a form field that doesn't look exactly the same in IE11 as it does in Chrome.

cadence

Adding on to this I hide the notification bar on my phone which means the app icons don't sit there staring at me all day luring me into pulling down the shade. Now I pull it down when I want to, not when I'm in the middle of some other task. It's small but it's definitely helped me.

You might want to read solderpunk's series on computing with focus, it seems relevant here. gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/gemlog/progress-toward-offline-first.gmi

abacushex

This is right in line with the process I hope to journal here at the pub. Thanks for the link, it will be informative to see what someone else has tried.

starbreaker

I remember reading this:

Progress towards "offline first"

Back when I was much more active in Geminispace. These days my involvement consists of doing a half-assed job of keeping tanelorn.city up and fulfilling the occasional account request.

Tanelorn in Geminispace