Digital Detox Goal
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
I teach people how to leverage their email systems to keep track of and complete their life tasks. Usually, these training sessions are scheduled for 2 hours. However, if I only had 2 minutes in front of a trainee to teach them something of value, I would simply show them how to turn off notifications for their email and on their phones.
If your phone, computer, tablet, or any other device is constantly dinging at you, you are spending valuable and finite time, energy, calories, life simply being distracted. Removing those digital distractions buys back so much of your precious life. I encourage everyone to take a day or two in the following weeks to do a ding audit. Set a goal to pay attention to each of the dings that you hear. Find out what the ding is for, and then ask yourself if you really need it. And if you want to find more time in your life to focus on what truly matters to you, the more no’s you say to the dings, the better. For example, the only notifications or noises that any of my devices make are for phone calls, text messages, and alarms that I set for myself. Email, social media, shopping apps…nothing else is allowed to ding at me. I go to these places when I want, but they don’t get to beckon me to them.
I’ve taught thousands of clients how to turn off notifications on their email. Some of them are frightened at first, thinking they might miss something important. But your email inbox is still just a few clicks away. You can visit it when you wish, it just shouldn’t dictate when that is. When I have follow up sessions with my clients, they often comment that turning off notifications was the easiest thing to do that reaped massive rewards. Without the constant dinging and pop-ups, people notice that they can focus longer because nothing is pulling them out of their flow.
If you want to get rid of notifications and you don’t know how, just Google how to do it, and you’ll probably find the process right away. Perhaps set a quarterly goal for yourself to do a ding audit to make sure no new dings and notifications have wormed their way unconsciously into your life. Save your precious minutes for the goals you consciously want to cultivate in your life, not the unconscious distractions.
If you or your team would like to sign up for our 2 hour Balance and Productivity training to instantly double your meaningful output and find the feeling of lasting flow and optimized work life balance, please email me at tana@focustoevolve.com and say hello!
With Sincere Gratitude,
Tana at Focus to Evolve