Overwhelmed by a barrage of messages, notifications and apps trying to get your attention? Here comes the first round of clean-up. Some of these Tools will work right away, some you might want to experiment with.

Customizing your digital devices can help reduce lots of stress and overwhelm, and wasted time on low value tasks. Thus you have more resources freed up to get more of what you actually value and have to little of into your life.

Apps and services are designed and optimized to be „engaging.“ Like a target seeking missile their algorithms are changing themselves to figure out how to best keep your attention hooked. Technology is not inherently values neutral.

This leads to a variety of individual and collective issues, which I won’t go in depth here.

What it might look for you at the individual level is this: Notifications, apps, and clutter our time and ability to focus, and do meaningful things in life. The average phone use was 8 hours per day some years ago. I was surprised to find out I used my phone 4 hours a day, with just some chat apps where nothing crucially important to me was posted.

Focus actually is a pre-requisite for entering Flow, a deeply satisfying and meaningful state of being. All triggers you can pull to enter flow are based on concentrated awareness on the now. Multitasking, spread out shifting attention will get you out of Flow, thus it decreases the quality and amount of fulfillment you can get. Notification, as well as blue light is also disrupting rest.

Supernormal stimuli and many other psychological mechanisms most of us aren’t aware of keep us coming back and checking phones and apps. It’s a tiny slot machine in our pockets, using rewards and lack thereof to keep us coming back. This is applied Behaviourism. We’re mistaking tokens of value (likes, text chats, …) for the thing they symbolize to us. Here we’re eating the menu, not the meal. Which of these are we aware of, and in what way? We’re like this goose.