- A new study has found that each notification can distract you for about seven seconds
- The more personally relevant the notification, the more distracting it will be
- Phones have tools to help fix this, like focus modes and other settings.
You probably don’t need a study to tell you that smartphone notifications can be distracting, but it seems like they’re even more distracting than you think.
According to a new report to be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior (via CNET), every time you receive a message notification on your phone, your attention is interrupted for about seven seconds. Given the number of notifications you’re likely to receive in a day (study participants, for example, receive about 100 per day), that can really add up.
The study involved having 180 college students perform a Stroop task, a test that involves color words flashing on a screen. Words are written in one color and appear in another, and the goal is to correctly identify the color of the font, ignoring what is written.
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The researchers divided the participants into three groups: one that received generic social media notifications on the screen while they took the test, another that was told the notifications mirrored those on their phone, and another that saw blurry notifications with illegible text.
In all cases, each notification was found to affect their attention for about seven seconds, but the effect was more pronounced among the group who believed the notifications mirrored those on their phone, showing that more personally relevant 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 observed that both the volume of notifications and the frequency with which people check their smartphones were related to greater disruption.”
“This pattern suggests that the fragmented nature of smartphone use, rather than simply the overall duration of use, may be a key factor in understanding how digital technologies influence care processes.”
So how to approach this? An obvious answer is to limit the ability to receive notifications. On iPhone, this can be done through Focus Modes, which allow you to customize which apps will send notifications when a specific mode (such as “work” or “sleep”) is active.
Depending on your Android phone, you may also have similar tools, such as Digital Wellbeing tools (which also include focus modes) on Pixel phones or a basic Do Not Disturb setting.
If there are some apps that you never want to receive notifications from, you can also permanently turn off notifications for specific apps, via that app’s section in your phone’s settings menu.
You may also want to see how notifications are displayed, as many phones let you choose how prominent they are or where they appear; These options are usually found in the notifications section of a phone’s settings menu.
You can also distance yourself from your phone, placing it in another room, for example, when you’re working, although if you’re wearing a smartwatch that keeps popping up notifications on your wrist, and although the study didn’t look at wearable devices, we imagine the impact is similar.
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