It's hard to imagine that even half of those notifications are useful; not to mention how much stress and distraction they could be causing.
That's why, for this quick win, we're going to reduce the number of notifications sent to your phone during the day.
In the last lesson, we set up a do-not-disturb schedule, which made your mornings and evenings notification-free. However, that doesn't solve the challenge of constant notifications coming in throughout the day, when your focus is most valuable.
Reducing the number of notifications sent to your phone stops you from being sucked away from your most important work for trivial distractions.
Go through your phone's settings and turn off all non-essential notifications. From now on, the only notifications on your phone will be the ones you decided to receive, rather than those your phone automatically decides.
How should you define unnecessary? Unless there is a clear and critical consequence to turning it off, the notification is unnecessary.
Types of apps you should certainly turn off include:
Here's an example of the few apps you can consider leaving on:
The thing in common with these apps is that they only notify you when something important is actually happening. They won't try and draw you in just for the purpose of taking your time and attention.
If all these changes make you a little nervous, that's OK. You can always turn individual apps back on later. The important thing is to experience life without your phone constantly stealing your attention.
Tip: To prevent "notification creep" (the gradual process of notifications retaking your attention) going forward, when an app asks for permission to send you notifications, start by declining it. This will stop "notification creep" from happening and will ensure you don't undo all the great work you've done in this lesson.