<story><title>Modern work requires attention – constant alerts steal it</title><url>https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/22/modern-work-requires-attention-constant-alerts-steal-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>headcanon</author><text>This is a big part of why I don&amp;#x27;t use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.&lt;p&gt;My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time. Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I&amp;#x27;m swimming upstream.&lt;p&gt;While I&amp;#x27;m not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine, at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how I interact with those environments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saiya-jin</author><text>What you named can effectively kill 8h, every effin&amp;#x27; day.&lt;p&gt;Personally, what I don&amp;#x27;t get is folks wearing smart watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings them. Its apparently not enough that phone blinks and plays sounds and your desk vibrates, now your wrist has to. How desperately addicted to constant stream of stimuli they are, my boss including (and he still thinks his apple watch are great, but when I sit next to him I see how it fucks him pretty badly, plus its so annoying I want to throw him out through closed window myself and I am not alone).&lt;p&gt;People still somehow do their job, &lt;i&gt;despite&lt;/i&gt; of these semi-useless gizmos, not thanks to them. Yes you can tune it down but for every person doing so there are 10, or more like 100 who don&amp;#x27;t do it at all. And not only for the case of my boss, it makes them objectively worse workers, employees, friends, parents and overall human beings.</text></comment>
<story><title>Modern work requires attention – constant alerts steal it</title><url>https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/22/modern-work-requires-attention-constant-alerts-steal-it/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>headcanon</author><text>This is a big part of why I don&amp;#x27;t use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.&lt;p&gt;My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time. Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I&amp;#x27;m swimming upstream.&lt;p&gt;While I&amp;#x27;m not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine, at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how I interact with those environments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qingcharles</author><text>HN is a killer for my productivity, even though I only try to visit it a couple of times a day. Once in the morning to read the whole front page, and then later in the day to get updates.&lt;p&gt;I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on the front page, plus the comments.</text></comment>