Windows on the desk, phone in my pocket, both set to a work focus that allows precisely nobody through. Screen time still reports around eighty pickups on a working day and the phone is not notifying me about anything. So clearly the notifications were never the problem. What did people actually do about the reaching, as opposed to the pinging?
I bought a cheap kitchen timer safe, the kind with a lid that locks for a set number of minutes, because I felt ridiculous but had run out of ideas. Pickups on working days went from somewhere in the eighties down to the teens within two weeks, and the teens were mostly at lunch. The unexpected part was how uncomfortable the first three days were, which told me more about the habit than the numbers did. It was not that I needed the phone, it was that I needed somewhere to put the boredom.
Disagreeing about the metric. Pickups is a bad number to optimise because it counts a glance at the clock the same as twenty minutes lost, and you can drive it down while your actual work stays just as fragmented. The number I care about is how many times I left the task, and I catch that with a tally on paper next to the keyboard: one mark every time I notice I have switched away, no judgement, just the mark. The act of marking is what changes it, and it costs nothing.
Worth auditing what you have allowed through, because almost everyone builds a leak into their own focus mode. People whitelist messages because of a family thing, or allow one work app because of an on call rotation, and then the mode is doing nothing except making them feel organised. On my phone the work focus allows exactly one contact and no apps, and my home screen in that mode is a single blank page with nothing on it, so unlocking the phone shows me nothing to tap. That last part cut my pickups more than the notification rules ever did, because the reward for reaching disappeared.
The blank home screen for a focus mode is the single best setting on those devices and almost nobody uses it.
Phone in another room, blank home screen, one allowed contact. Everything else is theatre you will defeat by week two.
@inbox_zero_ivo · 4mo ago · 3 replies
Notification blocking solves interruption. What you have is initiation, and the only thing that reliably beats initiation is distance. The phone has to be in a different room, not face down, not in a drawer, not in a bag by your feet, because all of those are two seconds away and the reach happens below the level of a decision. Greyscale, app timers and screen time limits are all speed bumps you learn to drive over within a fortnight. A different room is twelve seconds and a decision, and that is enough friction to make you notice you are doing it, which is the whole mechanism.
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@scripting_slowly · 4mo ago
Twelve seconds and a decision is a good way to put it. Every soft measure I have tried became invisible in about ten days.
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@inbox_zero_ivo · 4mo ago
That is the pattern with all of them. The measure has to cost you something you notice or your hands route around it.
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