The notification diet

On the first of May last year I turned off every notification on my phone except two: phone calls, and a text from my sister. I told nobody. I wanted to see how long it took for someone to notice.

It took eleven days. A colleague asked why I had not replied to a message, and I realised I had not seen it, because I had not been told it existed. She was not cross. She was puzzled, in the way you might be if a person you knew had started walking everywhere.

I have kept the arrangement for a year now. This is an account of what it did, and I will try to be fair, because most writing about this topic is either evangelism or confession, and I am not sure I have earned either.

The first month

The first week was bad. I do not mean that in a dramatic way. I mean that I picked up my phone about a hundred and twenty times a day, to check for things that were no longer announcing themselves. I counted, because the phone will count for you if you ask it nicely, and I was somewhat alarmed to find I had been picking it up every eight minutes or so while awake.

That is a different problem from the one I thought I was solving. I had assumed the notifications pulled me to the phone. In fact, I was reaching for it with nothing pulling at all. The notification was an excuse, and without it, the reaching went on, only now I was reaching for no reason.

By the end of the second week, the count was down to eighty. By the end of the month, to about fifty. It has hovered there since. I do not think I am cured. I think I have rearranged where the habit lives.

What I missed, specifically

I missed things. I will list a few so you know I am not pretending.

I missed a birthday dinner. A friend had moved it forward by a day in a group chat, and I arrived to a table that had already ordered. I apologised and bought the wine, and I have not been allowed to forget it.

I missed the delivery of a parcel, twice. The driver does not leave a note any longer, only an app message, which I did not see.

I missed, for about a week, a small piece of good news that someone had sent me. By the time I found it, the moment for being pleased had passed, and I replied with something warm and late, which is a different thing from replying with something warm.

What I stopped missing

The list on the other side is harder to write, because it is made of absences. But I will try.

I stopped being interrupted in the middle of sentences. I mean this in the most literal way. For years, I would be writing a paragraph, and a small sound would arrive, and the paragraph would not survive the sound. I did not notice the damage because it happened so often that it seemed to be what thinking was like.

I stopped having opinions about things that had happened two minutes ago in a place I would never visit. This is the one I am proudest of, although I did not choose it. The opinions simply stopped arriving, and I found that I did not miss them, and that the space they had occupied was larger than I had thought.

I stopped dreading the phone. It had become a slot machine, something I approached with a small clench, never knowing whether I would get a prize or a demand. Now it is a tool again. It sits on the shelf by the door, and I pick it up when I want to use it, as I would a hammer.

What other people saw

I had expected resistance, and mostly there was none. The people who loved me adjusted within a week, and the ones who did not simply stopped writing to me, which is also a result.

My editor was the interesting case. She had been used to sending a note and getting a reply within the hour, and for a while she took the silence as a verdict on her note. Once I explained, she laughed and said she had assumed I was cross. I had not realised that a slow reply is a message in itself. It says something whether you intend it to or not.

My mother, who is eighty, took the change as the best news she had heard in years. She had long believed that I was permanently on the phone, and now she could picture me doing something else. I did not tell her that I was still looking at the phone, only less often and on a schedule.

The numbers, in case you want them

I do like a number, so here are the ones I kept. Before the experiment, my phone reported about four hours and ten minutes of screen time a day. After the first month it was two hours and forty. After a year it is about an hour and fifty.

I should say that these figures are suspect. The phone measures itself, and a phone has views about the matter. It does not count the time I spent staring at the shelf where it lived, wondering about it. It also does not count the books, which went from about one a month to nearly two. That last number I trust, because I counted it by hand in the notebook.

How I made it work

There are some practical things, and I will put them here without ceremony.

The phone stays in another room when I write. Not face down on the desk, not on silent next to me. In another room, on the shelf by the door. The distance is the point. If I have to stand up, I have to decide to, and most of the time I do not.

I check messages three times a day, at about nine, one and six. I did not plan these times. I noticed they were what I did naturally and kept them. A fixed schedule is what lets me tell people honestly, “I will see it by evening.”

I told the people who matter how to reach me. This is the step I skipped at first, and it was my worst mistake. Once I said to my sister, my closest friend and my editor that a phone call would always get through, they relaxed, and so did I.¹

1 There is a longer version of this lesson, which I learned from my father. He worked as an electrician and had no patience for a person who said “you can reach me anywhere” and meant “I will sometimes answer.” What he valued, in a phone or a colleague, was not availability but a clear and honest account of when you could be found. He was suspicious of anyone who offered more than that, and when I was young, I thought this was rudeness. I now think it was the most generous thing he taught me, which is perhaps why I took forty years to say it.

Nobody is entitled to your attention at the moment they would like it. They are entitled to a reasonable reply.

That is a line from my notebook, written on the night of the birthday dinner. I was feeling sorry for myself and also, I suspect, defensive. I still think it is mostly right. But I notice that it is a line I wrote after I had hurt a friend, and I have trouble reading it without that in mind.

The thing I got wrong

I had assumed that fewer notifications would mean more time. This is not what happened. I did not suddenly gain hours. What I gained was something odder: longer stretches of the same thought, which is not the same as time, and can be a good deal more useful.

I spend about the same number of hours at my desk. But I get more done in them, I think, and the work is different in a way that is hard to measure. The things I write now have fewer seams. I no longer finish a paragraph with the faint sense that someone else wrote half of it.

That is still a feeling and not a result. I have no data that shows my work is better, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed they did. What I have is a year of days that felt somewhat less like being tugged, and a much clearer sense of how often I used to be.

The slow part

The surprising thing was how long the effect took to settle. For about three months, I felt as though I were holding my breath. The quiet seemed provisional, like a pause in a conversation that was about to resume, and I kept bracing for it.

Somewhere in the fourth month the bracing stopped. I cannot tell you the day. I noticed on a walk that I had not thought about my phone for the whole forty minutes, and that the not thinking had no effort in it. I stopped and stood on the path for a moment, a little suspicious, like a person who has stopped hearing a refrigerator.

Reading this back

I notice that I have written a good deal about what I gained and rather less about the dull middle, where most of the year went. Most days nothing happened. I wrote, I walked, I answered a few messages at one o’clock. A quiet life is hard to describe, because the description keeps trying to turn it into a story.

What I would say to you

I am wary of advice, mostly because the people who most want to hear it are the ones for whom it will not work. But if you are curious, I would suggest an experiment and not a lifestyle.

Pick a week. Turn off everything except the calls from people you would actually want to hear from. Do not tell anyone, but do tell one person you trust, so that someone can notice if you vanish. Count how many times you pick up the phone, honestly, with the little tally that your phone keeps. Look at the number on the first day and on the last.

The number is the interesting thing. Not because it will shame you, since I think shame is a poor teacher, but because it shows you how much of the pulling was coming from inside. That is a useful thing to know. I did not enjoy knowing it, and I would not go back.

A year on

The diet has changed a little. I let two apps announce themselves again, a calendar and the bank, since I once missed an overdraft warning and learned something about myself. I have turned the sound back on for one chat, a small group of three friends who message only when something is genuinely happening.

I have also made my peace with being slightly unreachable. People adapt faster than I feared. The colleague who noticed the silence now sends me a short email first and a message after, which means I read it at one o’clock with a clear head. She has told me, with some surprise, that she prefers it.

The phone is on the shelf as I write this. I can hear nothing from it, which is the sound I was after.