king talk

I think I am not exaggerating when I say that I am quite immersed in digital lifestyle. I send and receive tons of email, I use Twitter and Facebook a lot and almost all the news I get are somehow channeled through an RSS reader, Digg or some other kind of syndication. I’m being told all the time that in todays networld, you have to be everywhere at the same time, everything has to be instant and everyone needs to maintain a variety of communication channels at any given time.

Well, I did all that for quite some time and to be completely frank: it sucks. The biggest problem for me seams to be, that I am surrounded by applications that all somehow want something from me. The RSS reader tells me how many really interesting articles I am still supposed to read, Growl and Skype are doing a terrific job at reminding me about who went on- or offline just a second ago and thanks to push email I get notified about new messages in real time because every email could be really important, right!?

I found my enemy. His face: a red badge with a number on my application’s icons. His name: notifications. Over time I started feeling so overwhelmed by them that I couldn’t bear it anymore. So over the past month, I gradually started to take out those little bastards one by one.

Here’s a little list of the naggers I got rid of and why. This might not work for everyone, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a try, right?

Good advice right after the break.

1. The unread count of RSS readers. Those are plainly and simply stupid. If you have more than a few sources in your RSS list (and I have a few dozens of them) then it is absolutely impossible to read all of the entries and therefore an unread count is just a display of some arbitrary number that makes you feel miserable. The same is true for all Twitter clients by the way. This was the first thing I got rid of. Now I’m using feedly for my RSS which helped a lot.

2. Push email. This one is for the business folks. I firmly believe that email was never meant to be a realtime medium and that it should never be used as one. This is why I am convinced that push email is a product of hell. Even if you take out most of the spam, a high percentage of the emails you’ll get are likely not to be of any importance at all. I have no interest in being disrupted in my thought processes because of some mass email. And if someone has something really urgent to tell me, he should at least have the balls to give me a phone call.

3. Growl. If you are on a mac, chances are that you are using Growl. This notification service hooks into a variety of applications and lets them display non-modal messages in the corner of your screen (like the arrival of  new email or a new Skype message). Now, some of those messages might be important to you, but again: most of them are just useless clutter. Fortunately, Growl lets you fine tune the kinds of events you want to be notified of. Personally, I turned off Growl altogether at the moment, but I might switch it on again for some very specific events.

4. Skype, AIM, ICQ, MSN and every other instant messaging service. It should go without saying that if you are running one of those services people might use it to contact you. The problem is that it became sort of normal to start them whenever you login and never ever quit. What I did was two things. First, I slimmed down the services I use – I am now exclusively on Skype. Second, most of the time I am either in invisible mode or in do not disturb mode (so i don’t get notified about new messages when the application window is closed).

5. Mails unread badge. Just a week ago I deactivated both the unread badge and the incoming message sound in Mail. I actually did not know that you could turn those things completely off until someone told me about it, but boy – this works! Sure, I have to deal with more messages when I open Mail now, but whenever I do this I am in my message reading mood. This means not only can I be more focused on dealing with those messages, it also means that my responses are much less likely to have a harsh tone because of me feeling interrupted. And as for the »urgent message« excuse: see the part about push email.

So, this post turned out much longer than I expected, but I hope it gets my point across. In the end it all boils down to one thing: kill the distractions. Anything that gets between you and your train of thought better have a real good excuse for doing so.