3.6 - Turn off most notifications

Almost every default notification setting on your phone and computer is too aggressive. Every ping pulls your attention out of whatever you were doing. The cost of returning to deep work after an interruption is real, and it adds up over a day.

Turn off:

• Slack notifications (or mute, group channels, and check on your own schedule)

• Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram notifications

• Email notifications

• Browser notifications (basically all of them)

Keep only what you actually need to be interrupted by: a small number of essential people, calendar reminders, anything safety-related.

Try it. The world doesn't fall apart when you stop being instantly reachable. The urgent emails turn out to wait fine. The Slack messages get handled in batches a few hours later. The people who actually need you find a way.

The first week feels strange. By the second week, you wonder how you tolerated the noise.