Don’t Let Your Phone Be the First Thing You See in the Morning and Remember to Turn off All Unnecessary Notifications

Two simple ways to reduce stress by changing how you use your phone.

1 - Don’t Let Your Phone Be the First Thing You See in the Morning

Here is a simple question with a simple answer, so simple that we keep forgetting it. If you start your day taking an energy pill, what do you expect to happen?

The answer is simple, right? You expect to feel the effect of that pill all day long.

A similar thing will happen if you let your phone be the first thing you see/use in the morning.

Your phone is a super distraction pill

Your phone is like a super distraction pill, full of apps with one main objective: to fight for your attention.

The people who programmed those apps have invested a great deal of time and money in creating them that way. It’s their job, it’s what they are good at, and they are doing it as best as they can.

Do you think you have many chances of competing with them in their field of expertise? Do you believe you can control your attention when you open the door to the best experts in stealing it?

It will not be an easy task, and probably you will lose that fight.

Take control

So, what can you do? You can try to control:

• when you open the door;
• and how long you keep it open.

The first moment in the morning may not the best time to open that door to your smartphone. As soon as you pick up your phone, your mind will start receiving a lot of (mostly) non-important provocations.

The notifications, alerts, etc., will generate in your mind many unnecessary thoughts that will drain your energy into low-value tasks.

You can do better, you can create a better awakening routine.

Enjoy the moment you wake up

When you wake up, try to look around as if it was the first time you see what surrounds you. Be grateful for the good night’s sleep you had. Be grateful for waking up to live another wonderful day.

Give yourself some quality time — waking up slowly, meditating, having breakfast, looking outside — before picking your phone.

You have only one chance to wake up during the day — you can and should decide how it happens. Make it into a moment with a positive impact on the rest of your day.

Your phone is there to serve you. You can use it, but don’t let it use you.

2 - Turning off Cell Phone Notifications Can Make Your Day a Lot Better

Here is my personal story of how I learned this simple lesson.

How I learned this lesson

Sometime ago, I had to prepare a public presentation.

An important part of that presentation involved demonstrating a mobile application. For a few minutes, I would have to project on a big screen, for everyone to see, the way I was using that application on my smartphone.

In order to do that, I had to prepare my phone to prevent the possibility of something else appear on the screen when I doing my demonstration. I wanted to make sure that no notification or embarrassing personal message could show up on my smartphone screen during the presentation.

To avoid that, on the day before the presentation I checked on my phone what applications had active notifications — I never realized they were so many — and I deactivated most of them.

Although it involved some stressful moments, the presentation went well, and fortunately, no strange message appeared on the screen while the presentation was taking place.

The following days were very busy so I didn’t have time to set up the phone again and ended up leaving the notifications off for several days.

During those days something very interesting happened. I started to feel that something was different, I felt calmer and that I was able to be more focused on the tasks I had to do.

I realized that this was due — in large part — to the fact of not being interrupted so many times by the frequent notifications on my smartphone.

When I had time to check the notifications, I activated only the ones that were really essential, trying to limit these cases to a minimum. From that time on I also adopted as a good practice, whenever a notification appears on my cell phone, to check if it is or not important and if I can disable it on the respective app.

Takeaways

This simple change has contributed to make my days calmer.

Apps use notifications as a way to appeal to our attention, giving us the illusion — by the sound and design of the notifications — they are always about something very important.

But most of the time that is not the case.

If we do a careful analysis, we will conclude that:

• Most of the notifications are of no importance, so there is no need to be constantly interrupting what we are doing to check them.
• Other notifications, which may be of some importance, can probably be seen from time to time — once a day or a week — and in that way, they can also stop diverting our attention from the tasks at hand.

A recent study from RescueTime about cell phone usage found that people check their phones 58 times a day on average and 30 of those happens during working hours.

Imagine that a co-worker interrupts you 30 or 40 times a day. Would you allow that?

Would you consider that person as a friend, as someone that is helping to work better, or as someone that is bothering you and not allowing you to work properly?

So, should we allow our smartphones to do this?

Maybe not, maybe we need to be smarter than our smartphones.

To me, turning off most of the notifications on my cell phone was a simple but very significant change, it greatly improved my daily life.

I suggest you do a similar experiment and try the same change on your smartphone for a few days, for a week maybe. Take some time to check the notifications that are working on your cell phone and disable all that you don’t think are essential. Try to keep it that way for a week and evaluate the effects on your daily life.

You may discover a new and simple way to have calmer days.