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Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

Yes. People. This. And it applies even more to texts.

It prevents you from fully interacting with the people who are actually around you when you pull out your phone every 30 seconds to fire off a quick text reply.

There is absolutely no reason to check your texts on a continuous basis, as they come in. It makes you nervous and instills a perpetual low-grade anxiety in you.

If it's an emergency, they'll call you. If it's not, then it can wait.

tl;dr check notifications in batches, at predetermined checkin points, rather than continuously throughout the day. You'll be happier for it.

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I am a hyper paranoid person. If I don't check my phone, I think that someone might have messaged me. If my phone's notification light is blinking, I think of all the things it could be; the possibilities occupy 100% of my brain. I think -- what if mom just got hit by a bus? What if my doctor's calling me with test results? What if my sister's just found out she's having a baby?

These things are rarely the case. 90% of the time it's a spam e-mail or a note from a friend that doesn't need to be addressed right away. But I will still think about these things, and actively worry about them, until I read the message.

So it helps to put the phone away, somewhere where I can't see it, on silent so I can't hear it -- even still, I have to check it at frequent intervals, without a real pattern, because a random glint in the corner of my glasses will make me think "oh was that my phone? Wait, my phone's in the other room. I wonder if I have messages? Shit, what if someone's been trying to contact me?"

Yes, exactly!

The solution is simple (but not necessarily easy): turn off ALL notifications and badges and vibrations, except for the actual telephone function (i.e. when people call you synchronously, a traditional phone call.) Disable all the rest entirely. No blinking, no vibrating, no numeric badges with little numbers quietly ticking up and up in the corner.

Then tell all your important friends and relatives and co-workers to just call you on the phone, a real traditional synchronous phone call, if something truly important happens.

I got a Pebble for Christmas and it has solved this problem completely for me. I now no longer need to check my phone at all - there is no reason. If I have a text or email, I'll know instantly - there's no missing that wrist vibration. And because you can't reply from your wrist, there's no compulsion to - you know instantly if it can wait or not. Usually it can. Low-grade anxiety dismissed.

Uh... maybe it works for you, but to me, placing a vibrating notification on my wrist is the opposite of a solution.

It's probably related to the frequency of notifications. I don't get many, and they're easily missed, so the vast majority of my phone-checking was just compulsively making sure I hadn't missed anything, or "did it just vibrate? better check". Same goes for email - I was checking it way more than I was actually getting email. Needless stress, feeding an intermittent reward causing addictive behaviour. Converting all my communication to "push" instead of "pull" eliminated the intermittent reward (if I have a message I'll already know), and hence the addiction. To achieve that it's critical the notification be reliable, otherwise you'll still check. As a bonus, my phone is silent 100% of the time now.

I can easily imagine it from the other way around, though - if every time you check your messages you have tons, then making each one come through in real time would indeed drive you mad. One solution is to try and manage things so only important stuff gets "pushed" - another is your social solution of only treating phone calls as time critical, which is great if you can make the rest of the world fall into line.

I think it is very important to set expectations about this with peers and friends.

Texts and emails are asynchronous communications, but too often people forget that fact. I generally don't let texts break my workflow. People get pissed sometimes, but over the years my friends have learnt to expect reasonable delays in replies from me. :)

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