"It's the notifications, not me"

There's truth in this, and it's worth a chapter, because part of the habit isn't yours.

Most of the tools you work with are built to produce switches. An email program shows a preview in the corner of the screen. A chat program puts a red dot on its icon and bounces it. Your phone lights up and buzzes. None of that was designed around the way a person writes a report. It was designed to get messages seen quickly, and the makers measure success by how fast and how often you respond. The defaults that tools ship with serve that purpose. They don't serve Thursday's deadline.

So when you switch thirty times in a morning, some of those switches were more or less engineered. A preview slides in with the first eight words of a message, and chapter 4 showed that three seconds of attention is enough to drop the thread. You didn't decide to read it. Your eyes went to the movement, which is what eyes do.

The encouraging side of this is that defaults can be changed in a few minutes, and the change keeps working without any effort from you. Turn off the email preview and the sound. Turn off the badge that counts unread messages. In the chat program, set yourself to do-not-disturb during a stretch. Most of these programs let particular people or channels break through, which keeps the urgent route open. On your phone, turn off notifications from everything except calls and perhaps messages from family.

There's a study that suggests how far to go, and it has a useful warning in it. Nicholas Fitz and colleagues assigned 237 people to receive their phone notifications as usual, or in three batches a day, or not at all. The batched group did best on the researchers' measures of wellbeing. The group with no notifications at all felt more anxious and more worried about missing something. I'd take two things from that. Going without notifications entirely can backfire, because you start wondering what's happening and check by hand. And batching, where messages arrive at times you've agreed with yourself, seems to work better for people. That's the arrangement chapter 17 suggests for all your messages.

I don't want to push this too far, though. If you changed every setting tomorrow, you'd still switch. Chapter 1 noted that many of your switches start with your own thought, with no ping involved. People who turn off their notifications often find themselves opening the inbox every few minutes unprompted, to see what they're missing. The tools set the habit going and they feed it, but it now runs without them. So fix the settings, because it's easy and it removes a good share of the interruptions. The remaining chapters deal with the rest.