Those taxing (phone) pings could be ours

It’s official. Our smartphone is our mother. Well, that may be unfair. It’s more like our smartphone is our bill collector. Or our demanding, high-maintenance Significant Other or pet.

The dang things not only serve as the Swiss Army knives of our lives … they rule us, and can do so to our detriment, just by (a) being bearers of information and (b) letting us know, constantly, that they are bearers of information.

Sharon Horwood of Deakin University points to this in an online article, “Don’t let phone notifications stress you out. Here’s how” (from The Conversation, posted at cnn.com).

“With all those smartphone notifications, it’s no wonder you lose focus on what you’re trying to do,” she writes. “Your phone doesn’t even need to ping to distract you. There’s pretty good evidence the mere presence of your phone, silent or not, is enough to divert your attention.”

And we’re learning that notifications can be hazardous to our productivity … and ultimately, our well being.

The story goes that “the average person checks the phone around 85 times a day, roughly once every 15 minutes. … The trouble is, it can take several minutes to regain your concentration fully … .”

Yikes. Eighty-five times a day? That’s a sci-fi suspense/ horror movie there. Skynet has control! I, Phone Slave! Soylent green is … well, notifications!

Horwood goes on to inform us that those pings can evoke a high — “We can become conditioned to feeling excited when we hear our phones ping. It is the same pleasurable feeling people who gamble can quickly become conditioned to at the sight or sound of a poker machine.”

Hmmm. Hubby Dre doesn’t have a lot of phone-app notifications set up, but when his phone pings, his reaction is usually to groan in exasperation, much as he probably did when he was growing up and it was time to do chores (or much like how the Eloi of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” fame did when it was time to go get eaten by the Morlocks). The summoning ping usually turns out to be a come-hither text notification from an African-clothing e-tailer we both like, a doctor’s appointment reminder, or a notification from cell-service-provider Tracfone that they clawed his automatic monthly payment from our bank account.

By far, most of my phone notifications are from my News app. I’ll get multiple notifications, from multiple outlets, of the same news item. Or it will be the dreaded “Hey, will you call me?” text or Facebook Messenger message. Or the boss texting to see if I got her email or Slack message.

But then, apps try to tell me what to do. “You haven’t closed

your fitness ring today yet, only so-and-so more calories to go,” the fitness app tells me. The identity-theft protection app sends a notification saying they’d logged me out because I hadn’t been active for 15 minutes. The insurance company app tells me to send in my latest odometer reading for my safe-driving discount.

I thought I was being clever by simply keeping my phone on mute, a decision I made after having experienced it ringing or beeping at inopportune times. Which means I often miss phone calls. And … well … as Horwood indicates, it also means I check my phone that much more to see what notifications slid in silently. She calls that “an internal (or endogenous) interruption.”

“Think of every time you were working on a task, but your attention drifted to your phone. You may have fought the urge to pick it up and see what was happening online, but you probably checked anyway. In this situation, we can become so strongly conditioned to expect a reward each time we look at our phone we don’t need to wait for a ping to trigger the effect.”

Oh wow, like Pavlov’s dogs in that experiment. Salivating not at the sight of food but at the presence of the assistant. Or rather, slobbering not just at the informational reward we think the phone will bring us but at the mere presence of the phone.

Not only does the silent mode not work, but using the “do not disturb” feature doesn’t do much for me either. Some months ago I set a “do not disturb” time period of 9 p.m. to 8 a.m., basically following the time period businesses are not supposed to call and bother anyone. You guessed it … the phone will silently inform me, on my home screen, of the notifications that came in during the “do not disturb” period, so then I want to investigate the notifications I claimed not to want to be disturbed by.

Even more fun and adventure: As I work from home these days, I leave my work-issue editor’s iPad unmuted so that I won’t miss any work-related notifications. So Dre and I hear a ping and then try to figure out whether it was the iPad or his phone that did it.

And, Horwood tells us that evidence mounts that “push notifications are associated with decreased productivity, poorer concentration and increased distraction at work and school. Frequent interruptions from your phone can also leave you feeling stressed by a need to respond.”

She suggests beating the problem by charging our phones somewhere besides our bedrooms at night; asking ourselves whether a notification is worth checking (like when we get old and drop something and stand there trying to decide whether it’s worth the effort to pick up); and divvying up our time into chunks of concentration on our tasks, while taking an occasional break to check the phone.

Good suggestions … if we can keep from being worried that that next notification could be from our mother.