Set. Oh, oh, you said get set.
We threw you threw off our whole rhythm, Toby.
Hey, here we go.
What are we on? Twenty three.
Yeah. Welcome to episode 23, sponsored by
not phabletics, not phabletics.
The jackasses that bill you arbitrarily when you accidentally purchase.
Fabulous. That's awesome.
Raping your neighbor.
Yeah. If not you.
Hey, anyway, that's enough about our non-sponsor phabletics.
That's right.
All right. Today we are talking about notification fatigue.
Processed that.
Chase. Yeah.
What happened when you mix?
It's not chocolate and peanut butter tastes great together.
It's let's insert more technology into your process
and then squander your limited time and attention.
What's going on in notifications for you?
I there it's interesting.
Notifications.
It's really interesting because
we kind of talked about this last time, but like that that idea of.
Being reactive is a definition of work is pervasive.
Yeah.
Like if you just sit if you sit in any meeting that's remote
and you just watch the people just like literally just all you have to do
is just try to stay engaged.
Like I'm going to I'm going to be here for the meeting.
I'm going to be present for the meeting.
And you will see a whole bunch of people with their heads down
because their phone went off.
And I'm not like by no means am I being a hypocrite here.
Like I literally do the same thing.
You know, like the other the funny thing when COVID hit,
like the fun thing to do was to send your buddy a text
to see if they would crack up.
That has continued.
Like like I don't know.
I don't know if I know anyone who did not do that.
But but that's beside the point.
Yeah, it's you're right, though, the notifications.
And and it's not just you've received you've got mail.
You know, it's text messages and it's slack and it's social media.
And and then we have the digital household.
So it's your ring camera or your kids just got home and came through the garage.
Every process of our life.
When I heard, you know, your digital home and your digital life,
I thought what they meant was we're going to make things easier.
And I think the reality was we're just going to have everything scream at you
like Minority Report, you know, that's that's how I feel today. Yeah.
So when's when's the last time that you actually opened
a email marketing campaign?
Oh, it you know, they have to have a good headline.
Oh, 100 percent.
And it was it was last week I opened one specifically
because I thought, I wonder if I can rip this off.
Oh, oh, so it was more of like a hey, I like this headline.
This is this is grabbing me. Let's steal it.
It was. But in full disclosure, I also subscribed to the theory
that everything is this learning opportunity.
And I think sometimes it's just an excuse because, you know, squirrel.
Yeah, I'm pretty easily distracted.
And it was a good headline.
I thought, I wonder how I might repurpose this.
What about you? What's the last time you opened one?
I have been trying to unsubscribe on my Gmail.
I so I this is embarrassing, but I got something on Poshmark.
I don't know. Oh, I know what it was.
It was it was a nice dress. I'm just kidding.
It wasn't a dress. It was a it was.
I think it was a mug.
It was a mug for the wife for Christmas, I think. Nice.
But because I was on it and because that's where I got it,
they just hammer me all the time.
So I like I'm like it's painful to unsubscribe to some of these things.
And again, it's just notification.
Like I just got it's like it's like you've got it's like we've surrounded
ourselves with a bunch of 80 DG children that are hawking their wares.
It's out of control.
Yeah. And that's just that's just in our personal lives.
Like the same goes on at work.
It's like, did you get the thing? Did you get the thing?
Like, it's crazy. Yeah.
And well, in the part, you know, the one two punch for me is
ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,
in the Las Vegas kind of madness. Yeah.
Everything I'm getting all these notifications.
And when I get one that is actually useful,
yeah, I can't just click it and go to it.
Now I click it and then I sign in.
And then ask me to go find something else to authenticate
or let us send you an email because we don't trust you. Yeah.
And so, you know, it's it's kind of like TSA for me.
And for all I know, TSA prevents thousands of
you know, nefarious things every day.
I doubt it. But, you know, even one is good. Right. Yep.
But on the off chance,
we all get naked to go into the airport and board our planes.
Or at least if I've been doing that, I get some odd looks sometimes.
You don't tell me to put my clothes on once I get struck down.
So I just assume. Right.
But Dale, man, you know, it's like, oh, here's
on this other side of it.
We've gone so far overboard as we've digitized everything. Yeah.
Now I feel like I spend half my day trying to figure out two factor
authentications. Oh, yeah.
Minutes I'm going to approve a payment.
Nope. It's going to take five minutes. Yeah. Right.
But bang, bang, bang.
We've adopted Slack like a lot of organizations.
And one of the things I love is that it's this nice asynchronous thing.
And if somebody sends me a note, I can follow up later.
I don't have to drop everything. Yeah.
God forbid they give me a good headline that pops up in that little teaser.
Yeah. I'm going to drop everything.
It's going to be like. I'm done.
Although I'm a little shocked that you didn't understand
that it was a strip search, like you just started stopped at stripped.
I'm a little concerned there, but.
Well, I was searching to see who else was stripping.
I clearly misunderstood.
This is why I enjoy these.
I never know what I'm going to learn.
And you have no idea what I'm going to divulge.
So do notifications help?
If I had to choose between all or none.
It's no brainer for me.
What about you? I go back to the end.
I'd go back to none.
Like even just even just saying that out loud is all I can say.
Like even just saying that out loud is almost like this kind of.
Encouraging. Yeah, it's this encouraging like, oh, that could be really nice.
Like not like.
Like what would it be like to do like just some elegant,
wonderful work where I'm stretching myself a little bit,
doing something that I'm proud that I feel like has value.
And I'm not I'm not task switching so much.
Oh, man.
I've talked in the past, I think.
I don't remember if it was on the show, but this idea.
Oh, there goes a notification in the background.
I'll be right back. No, I'm kidding.
I'm staying with it. All right.
But clearly, I just had hijacked.
No, you know, the the task switching burns.
What I've read is about 20 minutes to resume the original task and get back into any level of focus.
Yeah, but it is it's all those dings.
It's all the little flashes.
Yep. I think that's why the idea of leaving the house without a phone is so appealing.
Yeah. You know, is is that hey, silence mode.
The yeah, it's it's insane.
And now that we have digital phones with us, it used to be we're talking in our earlier episode about, hey,
you know where I'm at because you just all the number for my house.
Yep. I don't know when it stopped being our convenience and technology became the master.
You know, that's yeah, it's turned us into always on always working resources.
Yeah, it's crazy. It's nuts.
I don't know. Do you have do you have a strategy, you know, that something you do to try to get out of the notification and help?
Not as I'm not as disciplined as I want.
And I think some of that is because it depends on your business culture.
Yeah. And if your business culture is that you have to always be responsive, then you will always be responsive.
And if that's what wins, like I think that the counter to that is that if you're responsive, your work is sloppy.
It's there's just no way around it. Like you you will deliver sloppier work.
You might deliver more like you might make it up on quantity like here's.
But it's just it's sloppier. It's not well thought through.
The one thing that I that I have tried in the past, you know, turning off going on, do not disturb.
Like, it's funny, I've turned it on and just forgot that it was on every once in a while.
And I'm like, guys, this is great. You know, and all of a sudden, right afternoon, what is going on?
You know, my wife is getting mad at me because I didn't text her back, you know, like, but but it was magical while it was silent.
But but I think I think that's one one thing there. There's a there's an application called Freedom.
Freedom to I think that's what it's called. Oh, OK.
Hold on. Let me just double check. That's who we should get to sponsor us.
We should do that. We should call these we should actually.
OK, so freedom to like Quang face enjoy Orbison.
No, no. Freedom to freedom to.
So freedom to you is that yeah, to so not not not not like dot com, but freedom.
I want to thank you. OK. Freedom.
Freedom to is basically an app that turns off applications or websites.
And you can turn it on. It plays music.
It'll turn off your phone. Like it basically like put it forces you to be in.
Do not distract the mode. I don't use this as much as I I would like.
And I don't know if I could actually install this on my work PC, but it is where you want it.
Yeah, of course. Let's not talk about that.
That's the sense of the object.
But but this is actually this is actually one of the better,
better tools that I've used because it just shuts everything down.
Yeah, like it just forces you to to like not do anything,
but whatever you're you're focused on. And that that's actually been pretty wonderful.
I do have I also have a timer that's like an egg timer that
that actually shows the time like you guys can't see it.
But but basically it's it's like it basically is it's like a regular egg timer,
but it shows the it's called what is this?
The time timer is what it's called.
That's the other people we should get to sponsor us the time timer.
But the time timer is timer it.
The way that it works is it's just like an egg timer.
But you see the actual kind of the countdown.
It's almost like it's like a pie chart that's getting smaller.
So it's from 100 percent all the way down.
And so visually you can actually see the time change.
And those are just those are two things that I've that I've used,
that I've found somewhat helpful.
But again, like if I can't change the culture at work,
which is I've got to be responsive.
Because what what wins at work is responsive, then I'm just kind of stuck. Yeah.
You know, it makes me want to set the out of office message when I'm in the office.
They just as I'm in the middle of some really deep shit.
And if this is important, come find me.
But otherwise, I'll get back to you this afternoon.
Maybe maybe that's that's not a that's a PG 13 word.
So that may not work for all workplaces and audience recognizing that.
Yeah, because you're right. It's.
People don't know what you're doing.
We don't have an on air flashing light like you might have in an old radio
video that tells people I'm in the middle of something.
You know, I'm a. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
You know, some offices have the little hotel desks,
like little hotel rooms where it's just basically single and you can, you know,
that that has a little bit of a drawback because you don't have your set up.
Right. So you're not on two screens, but you're less distracted.
Right. So maybe maybe the reality is because we're less distracted.
We feel less productive, but really are like I think we're so distracted
that we don't even know we're distracted.
Like, that's the crazy thing.
When Wendy, when was the last time you felt truly productive for more than two hours?
I've had some magical weekends.
I would say Saturday, Saturday morning.
Yeah. My wife is she she works night, so she's up.
She's up late quite a bit.
Yeah. And then I tend to work.
I work with with, you know, people that are in Europe and in Asia.
And so that means I'm up really early.
And so my the most magical times of my of my week are literally
seven thirty or six a.m. on a Saturday till about 10.
Wow. And I like and it's it's stuff that I choose choose to do.
It's magic. It's it's literally the funnest part of my week.
Isn't that crazy? And sometimes it'll be work.
Sometimes it'll be me dinking around with a GPT or something or an LLM or,
you know, messing around with data like it might be something,
but it's something that I want to do.
And at the end, I oftentimes just feel very satisfied.
And it's it's because no one's asking of my no one's distracting me.
It's the weird. It's just weird.
Like, and again, like if we went 200 years, you know,
200 years ago, like I think we would they would look at us like we're crazy.
Right. But I mean, that's I think that's the reason why so many of the,
you know, the founding fathers of the U.S.
so much of their writing actually, I guess, was done in the middle of the night.
Right. Because lights go out.
We don't have modern electricity and people only sleep for three or four hours.
They'd get up for a couple hours and then go back to bed.
Yeah.
And and I've heard that described when this was recounted to me
as one of those most productive times.
Yeah. Because maybe everybody's not up in your household.
Yeah. That's awesome that you found a window.
I think I think kind of like knowing the food that feeds you and makes you feel good.
Yeah. You know, similarly, not all hours in the day are equally valuable.
Yep. And so that's awesome.
It happens to be on a weekend where it's fully in your control.
Yeah. And not on the clock.
So that's great. Well, hey, quick, guys, we're wrapping up.
Just want to say thanks to our friends in the Bay Area, Knob Hill neighborhood.
There you go. Thank you for tuning in.
Love it. Your your patent
denial of the Fabletics tribe is much appreciated.
Yeah. Thanks for not paying them anything.
Yeah. Don't don't pay for that blood stuff.
Yeah, that's right. All right, man.
Thank you. Yep.
Take care. See you. Bye.