[HN Gopher] Modern work requires attention - constant alerts ste...
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Modern work requires attention - constant alerts steal it
Author : djha-skin
Score : 156 points
Date : 2023-05-22 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog)
| tj-teej wrote:
| The comments and discourse here is always so black and white.
|
| If you're lucky enough to have creative work where you can
| deliver the most value by doing focused work all day, then by all
| means ignore your slack and email. BTW I'm very jealous of your
| job!
|
| Why can't we just be adult professionals who can decide for
| themselves when to spend time without distractions and when not
| to? Surely we need both right?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The problem isn't when you have a software dev, say, doing
| focused work, and their manager, say, being interrupt-driven.
| That's fine (though the majority of us here on HN are "focused
| work" types, so their viewpoint tends to predominate).
|
| The problem comes when the manager (or IT or someone else)
| decides that _everyone else_ has to be available for instant
| response to the alerts. That violates your "adult
| professionals" rule, too.
| jmcphers wrote:
| The cookie popup that comes up and obscures the article before
| you can finish reading the title is deliciously ironic.
| bborud wrote:
| If you are lucky. There's the cookie popup, the newsletter
| popup, the popup that wants to talk about new features....and
| on and on. All while macOS gives you three popups for the same
| calendar event, a software update that it thinks you should
| know about _right fucking now_ and a slew of popups from some
| application you started which now wants to disrupt your flow
| with.....more alerts.
|
| PS: if someone knows who wrote the calendar daemon in macOS,
| please say hello from me and ensure they know how pathetic I
| think it is that they managed to spend 70-80% CPU to update
| calendars. Really? Do them a favor and get them application
| forms in the "rapid food preparation" industry.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| The Calendar app on my iPhone used 50mb of data in the last
| month. I have maybe 10 events in it. I can't even begin to
| understand how it managed to pull 50mb. WhatsApp, which I use
| nonstop daily, pulled 3mb.
|
| Sure, on an unlimited cap 50mb is no problem. But when
| roaming it could cost a fortune. Seems like minimising
| resource usage is often an afterthought, even for Apple.
| cbhl wrote:
| IIRC the Calendar standards (iCal, etc) are pull-based, so
| your Calendar app has to poll/request the whole calendar
| constantly to check for new events in case you make one on
| another device (e.g. your computer). There are also enough
| edge cases that also nobody wants to change/improve on the
| standards.
|
| WhatsApp can send you a push when you get a message, so its
| usage is ~nothing if you're not sending and receiving
| messages.
| bborud wrote:
| That still doesn't explain why it has to consume huge
| amounts of CPU.
| bborud wrote:
| Hmm, it almost makes me suspicious that the calendar system
| is abused to move data it isn't supposed to move.
| pwg wrote:
| With uBlock Origin set for default deny all Javascript, there
| are zero popup's while reading the entire article.
| Ntrails wrote:
| God I wish I could make that run on my iPhone.
|
| Not being able to set per domain javascript rules is fucking
| infuriating
| californical wrote:
| Genuinely not sure what methods they went through, but you
| can install it (and other firefox+chrome extensions) on the
| Orion browser. But they also have a built-in ad & tracking
| blocker that works well
| HPsquared wrote:
| Not sure about iPhone, but most browsers on Android (e.g.
| Chrome, Edge) let you disable JavaScript in "site settings"
| by default. You then opt-in for a given site by clicking
| the little padlock on the address bar and enabling
| JavaScript for the site in question. Also works for things
| like audio, location, etc.
| slondr wrote:
| Safari on iOS lets you do this in the system settings
| HPsquared wrote:
| A lesson for us all
| dmart wrote:
| I'm jealous of technology workers from about 10 years ago, before
| work IM tools like Slack, HipChat, and Teams became the standard.
| Being able to work uninterruptedly except for emails (for which a
| delayed response was acceptable) sounds like an absolute dream. I
| dread the constant feeling of low-level anxiety induced by these
| tools (Gotta keep that status icon green! Gotta respond to
| messages right away!)
| Trigg3r wrote:
| It was just email based instead (still is, somewhat?), plenty
| of distractions, how great would it be to just code (tm)?
| rzzzt wrote:
| Do you have no IRC, ICQ, AIM or Skype in your past?
| ardit33 wrote:
| Plenty of distractions with email as well. Also, folks used
| MSN/Yahoo chat regularly before HipChat/Yammer/Slack came to
| picture.
|
| But I agree, overall it was a lot less distractions to get
| things done. On the other hand, the web had a lot less
| resources to get things done (this was before Stackoverflow),
| so if you stumbled into technical issues it took longer to
| resolve them.
| ivan888 wrote:
| So get rid of the stupid persistent red dot on review queues on
| Stack Overflow
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| but someone has to contribute vast amounts of unpaid labor to
| make their investor's purchase profitable!
| chatmasta wrote:
| I have "Do Not Disturb" enabled 100% of the time, except when I'm
| waiting for a delivery. Incoming calls from unknown numbers are
| also automatically silenced.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I turned off all alerts except for messages from my family. I
| check everything else often enough and people really can't tell
| the difference in my responsiveness. My overall happiness is
| higher now that things aren't popping up or vibrating all the
| time.
| dheera wrote:
| Same.
|
| - I block all unscheduled phone calls, whitelisting only
| parents/SO
|
| - I block all notifications and check apps pull-only
|
| - During work hours I check Slack about once every 30 minutes.
| (If there's some urgent deadline coming up I might check it a
| few more times in the evening but that's not the norm)
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I side with you, same here. WhatsApp is pull only, so to say,
| no alerts at all. Other apps are restricted by iPhone.
|
| I am so glad there is no "Hacker News" app. ;)
| collenjones wrote:
| Octal
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Dude I'm using HACK app right now :-)
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| I installed a HN app from F-droid that was quite pleasant on
| a recent trip, when I had long stretches of time that I
| wanted to read something.
|
| Unfortunately, I could tell that I would spend a lot of time
| on it so I uninstalled it post-haste when the trip was over.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| [dead]
| sigstoat wrote:
| i worked with this guy who had alerts popping up on his screen
| for everything that was anywhere in his calendar (somebody else
| having a meeting in room X? he got an alert when it started),
| every email that arrived for him, and probably some other stuff,
| too. while you were talking to him, his head would twitch over to
| the monitor every time one came in, yet he never knew what email
| he'd received.
|
| i don't think i've ever met anyone who had a higher defect rate
| in their code.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| We need to get over ourselves with this "modern work" phrase. All
| work requires attention.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Are you saying people thousands of years ago making cloth
| fabric by hand needed attention? Unbelievable.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Trying to build an Antikythera mechanism but I keep being
| handed wax tablets notifying me about 4 people liking the
| murals my friend made about his visit to Corinth last month,
| and now my politically weird uncle has apparently added me to
| a group celebrating the thirty tyrants of athens.
| ok_dad wrote:
| My father in law (deceased) used to spend 8-10 hours a day
| doing woodworking art for his business, then several hours
| delivering things to customers each day as well. I asked
| him how it tool 8-10 hours to do 3-6 pieces when I had been
| watching and he finished each one in about 30 minutes
| (other than paint drying and stuff). He said that people
| were always talking to him, because his store and work area
| were basically right in the middle of town and he worked
| out front rather than inside because he had no workshop in
| the store. I hung out with him for a day and saw no less
| than a dozen different people stop by and have 10-15 minute
| conversations with him, and he couldn't do much work during
| that time.
|
| That's a pretty useless story for HN, but seemed relevant
| to the topic at hand, and I like remembering my father in
| law and telling stories about him (I miss him
| considerably).
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Virtual Reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism, the
| oldest known example of an analogue computer from 200 BCE:
| https://youtu.be/MqhuAnySPZ0
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Right, the issue is that "modern" work still requires
| attention, but is often accompanied by an expectation for
| responsiveness and a wide array of demands on the worker's
| attention.
|
| Nobody is saying "why aren't our production line employees very
| active on the #dogsofourworkplace slack channel?"
| trey-jones wrote:
| My thoughts, exactly. Unfortunately, I think it's not simply
| that constant alerts steal attention, but also that dependence
| on computers is also training us to _not_ pay attention. The
| computer will tell us the problem and how to solve it, no
| thought required, a lot of the time. Therefore, we need to be
| even more alert than we used to (have to be), in order to spot
| the rare occasion that the computer is wrong, and apply thought
| and common sense. Additionally (for me at least), controlling
| the quality of the computer tends to be less fulfilling and
| less exciting work than actually solving problems myself,
| meaning I don 't care as much about it and am not as attentive
| to it.
| headcanon wrote:
| This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN and
| Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream
| of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less
| in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.
|
| My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text
| messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can
| handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time.
| Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming
| upstream.
|
| While I'm not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine,
| at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how
| I interact with those environments.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN
| and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant
| stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me
| feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.
|
| I've been using social media apps for years with notifications
| disabled. I switched phones recently and notifications got re-
| enabled. The deluge of useless notifications was terrifying.
|
| I routinely go through my day's notifications and disallow
| notifications from apps that I don't want to see. It doesn't
| take long to clean them up and it makes a huge difference.
|
| Unfortunately, my worst offenders are Slack and work-related
| pings by a mile. It only takes a few busybodies to rain
| notifications down on the team all day long.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| What you named can effectively kill 8h, every effin' day.
|
| Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart watches,
| getting instant notifications when somebody pings them. Its
| apparently not enough that phone blinks and plays sounds and
| your desk vibrates, now your wrist has to. How desperately
| addicted to constant stream of stimuli they are, my boss
| including (and he still thinks his apple watch are great, but
| when I sit next to him I see how it fucks him pretty badly,
| plus its so annoying I want to throw him out through closed
| window myself and I am not alone).
|
| People still somehow do their job, _despite_ of these semi-
| useless gizmos, not thanks to them. Yes you can tune it down
| but for every person doing so there are 10, or more like 100
| who don 't do it at all. And not only for the case of my boss,
| it makes them objectively worse workers, employees, friends,
| parents and overall human beings.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| I ran a small side business for a while - at the time I had a
| fitness tracker style watch that would vibrate every time I
| got an email or notification. At first it was thrilling but
| after a while as the workload got too much I realised every
| time it vibrated my heart rate would increase and my anxiety
| would spike. It felt like I was on 24/7 on-call.
|
| Now I don't receive any notifications. I check my messages
| too often still, but at least it's on my terms.
|
| I still wear a fitness tracker but now it's just a watch.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Haha, that sounds horrible. Next up, Google Glass
| notifications as augmented reality pop-ups! :D
|
| > _People still somehow do their job_
|
| While getting an order of magnitude more emails/DMs than I
| do, both personally and professionally if they're in
| management roles. Sounds like hell.
| over_bridge wrote:
| My watch tells me when I have a meeting in 10min, if I get a
| call and if a family member messages. That's it. If I need to
| take medication I'll set an alarm as well but that's still
| infrequent. Only things I know I have to take action on right
| away.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart
| watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings
| them.
|
| My watch is my primary defense against interruptions. With
| the watch, I can leave the ringer and vibrator off on my
| phone entirely. When an alert happens, my watch vibrates once
| and that's it. It's an intrusion that's easy to ignore when I
| don't want to be interrupted.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| I've taken it upon myself to aggresively curtail all the
| notifications that my phone is allowed to show me.
|
| Texts, calls, or anything that I might need to see immediately
| is all that I allow. Emails, ads, and other crap gets canned
| the first time I see it. If it's not urgent, then I don't need
| to know about it.
|
| I've even started removing notification noises from my
| groupchats with my friends, so the notification will let me
| know there's a conversation happening but I won't be pestered
| into participating.
| burntwater wrote:
| > so the notification will let me know there's a conversation
| happening but I won't be pestered into participating
|
| I really wish more (any?) chat programs let you know some
| kind of conversation was happening, but wasn't pinging you
| every single message. Something like every X hour(s) there's
| a notification that says "X messages have been received," or
| when a chat has been idle for an extended period of time,
| then after X time the first new message comes in I receive a
| notification for only that first message.
|
| As is, 90% of my chat apps have notifications completely
| disabled, and I have to manually go in to see if anything has
| happened.
| foobar_______ wrote:
| I feel like I could have written this comment verbatim. Glad
| I'm not alone in the world. Thanks for sharing.
| qingcharles wrote:
| HN is a killer for my productivity, even though I only try to
| visit it a couple of times a day. Once in the morning to read
| the whole front page, and then later in the day to get updates.
|
| I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which
| articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on
| the front page, plus the comments.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| My worst productivity killer is getting into an argument
| early in the morning with someone on HN or a similar site.
| Even if I stop visiting the site, my mind keeps thinking
| about the argument for a couple of hours instead of whatever
| it is supposed to do.
| carrja99 wrote:
| I save time by only reading HN for the comments.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I don't even read the comments, just stream of conscious
| writing.
| brianjking wrote:
| I'm starting to try to switch my phone to greyscale during the
| day.
| zwieback wrote:
| Related question: are there some employees that are so motivated
| to solve the problem in front of them (or simply more
| disciplined) less likely to get distracted? If so, what has been
| the relative productivity hit to "diligent" vs. "slacking"
| employees?
| biomcgary wrote:
| Attention is all you need.
| moffkalast wrote:
| So goes for robots as does for humans.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| Underrated comment
| lr4444lr wrote:
| No mention of Cal Newport?
|
| I'm torn on this. Yeah, it'd be great to have a hard line between
| dev and ops with both groups also having managers to shield them
| from the business team that protects the mental states of flow of
| each. But realistically, IME, devs who respond to the ops issues
| on the features they build directly from the biz people are way
| more valuable to the bottom line of the company in terms of
| getting high value work done. Yeah, it's not optimal, but
| throughput per dev on the aggregate and a deep understanding of
| the tech vis a vis the actual business needs its serving is
| really important.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Really, we should be asked if we want notifications in the first
| place. I find chat apps like Teams, Discord, alert _way_ too
| much. The signal to noise is tiny. Maybe this is my fault (I
| never really "got" Discord, Slack, Teams etc. like I got email,
| IM, SharePoint and phone calls), but I get added to group
| chats/Teams without me knowing and just start getting visual,
| audio and haptic (on my phone) alerts with very little context.
| It's a bad UX. At least my phone makes it relatively easy to mute
| things, or everything.
|
| I wish there was a mute all notifications button on my keyboard
| like I have a mute mic and mute audio button. Aside from letting
| me focus, it would be really useful when presenting. Going
| through a few clicks through the notification center in Windows
| is a start, but it is too hidden to be obvious to anyone not
| specifically looking for it and is a bit cumbersome if you flip
| things on and off frequently.
| manmal wrote:
| I've turned off push notifications for most productivity apps
| on my phone, and haven't ever missed them. Slack and email have
| no business appearing on my home screen.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I just turn off my WiFi completely when I want to do work and
| need less distractions. One problem I have, though, is that
| toddlers have no "off" or "mute" button, so during non-school
| days it's kinda difficult to get more than one medium-sized (an
| hour or less time) thing done.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > one medium-sized (an hour or less time) thing done
|
| Totally off-topic, but this fascinated me because it
| highlighted how differently people regard task size. If I
| have a task that can be done in about an hour or less, I call
| that "very small". A small task can be done in a day, a
| medium in a single-digit number of days.
|
| Just a thing that struck me as interesting.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| I don't have a Windows solution to the "mute everything for
| presentations" problem, but for anyone on macOS: option-click
| on the clock / notification section in the menu bar and you'll
| put yourself into Do Not Disturb mode. Option-click the clock
| again to disable.
|
| The discoverability of that shortcut isn't great but it has
| become one of my favorite macOS features.
| kogus wrote:
| I believe the Windows equivalent is to click on the Calendar
| in the Taskbar, and select the "Focus" triangle
|
| Reference:
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-use-
| focus...
|
| Amusingly, the first thing it does is put a big countdown
| clock on your screen, counting down the time till your
| "focus" ends. Otherwise it works pretty well.
| bouke wrote:
| Except for Teams not respecting this setting and forcefully
| projects its own ugly notifications nonetheless.
| Eduard wrote:
| > In tough economic times, everyone looks for ways to lower costs
| without impacting productivity
|
| Has it ever been any different?
| raydiatian wrote:
| Solution: disable notifications. It turns out life is pretty
| great when you don't know what's happening in the news cycle.
| "But how will I hold relevant conversations with my friends and
| family?" If all you discuss with your community is current
| events, congratulations, you're the perfect unit of manufactured
| consent.
| OJFord wrote:
| But I do want them if someone's asking for help I might be able
| to give, or frankly even if it's just something chatty/'bants'
| (that could change if there was more of it of course) - 'status
| updates' (shared as messages) though really wind me up. OK,
| have a nice lunch. OK, won't message you for a bit then - but I
| wasn't going to and this isn't a phone call or meeting so I
| wouldn't expect an immediate response anyway.
|
| If you're worried someone's going to try to reach you while
| you're out for half an hour and be upset that you don't reply
| sooner, just use the (Slack) built-in feature for that?
|
| I agree about news though - call me 'uninformed' if you want,
| but I think anyone who tries it quickly learns how little of it
| matters. (And I was a paying Times (London) subscriber before
| that, not like I was reading gossip mags, tabloids, and Sky
| News shock-horror clickbait.) Major stuff makes it to HN
| anyway.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is why I've completely disabled all notifications in
| Windows. Those "toasts" are a distraction I can't ignore since
| they forcibly impose themselves over whatever I'm focusing on.
|
| Better that they never happen. Nothing in the operating system is
| so important that it needs a toast.
| lemonberry wrote:
| And not just work. Not that it isn't important, but in addition
| to work (my own business) I'm a caregiver for my father.
|
| I have very little free or down time. If I don't minimize or cut
| out alerts I cannot make good use of that time.
|
| Alerts add to my cognitive overload and stress. The tighter I
| lock down my alerts (and inputs) the less stressed I am.
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