- A new study found that each notification can distract you for about seven seconds
- If the notification is personally important, it is more intrusive
- Phones have tools to help deal with this, such as focus modes and other settings
You probably don’t need a lecture to tell you that smartphone notifications can be distracting, but it turns out they’re more distracting than you might think.
According to a new report to be published in the June issue of Computers in Human Behavior (via CNET), every time you get a message notification on your phone, it distracts you for about seven seconds. Considering how many notifications you might receive per day – with study participants for example receiving around 100 per day – it can really add up.
The study involved getting 180 university students to perform a Stroop task – that is a test that involves flashing colored words on a screen. Words are spelled in one color and appear in another, and the goal is to correctly identify the color of the font, ignoring the text.
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The researchers divided the participants into three groups – one that received regular social media notifications on the screen while taking the test, one that was told that the notifications mirrored those on their phone, and one that had blurry notifications with illegible text.
In all cases, it was found that each notification affected their attention for about seven seconds, but the effect was more pronounced among the group who believed that the notifications mirrored those on their phone – indicating that personal notifications are more distracting.
Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and first author of the study, told CNET that “we saw that both the volume of notifications and how often people look at their smartphones are related to greater distraction.”
“This pattern suggests that the different nature of smartphone use, rather than just the duration of use, may be an important factor in understanding how digital technology influences attentional processes.”
So how to deal with this? One obvious answer is to limit the ability of notifications to reach you. On the iPhone, this can be done with Focus modes, which allow you to customize which apps will send notifications when a certain mode (such as ‘work’ or ‘sleep’) is active.
Depending on your Android phone you may have similar tools there too, like the Digital Wellbeing tools (which include focus modes) on Pixel phones, or the basic Do Not Disturb setting.
If there are other apps you don’t want notifications from, you can also permanently disable notifications for certain apps, by using that app section of your phone’s settings menu.
You may also want to check how notifications are displayed, with most phones letting you choose how prominent they are or where they appear — these options are usually found in the notifications section of the phone’s settings menu.
And you can distance yourself from your phone, put it in another room for example when you are working, even if you are wearing a smart watch that will not block the notifications from your arm, and although the study did not look at wearables, we can think that the effect is the same.
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