Transcipt
A study conducted by the productivity app, Asana showed that workers were using slightly fewer apps per day last year compared to the year before. However, they still felt really overwhelmed by them. Now, I’m sure this isn’t the first productivity video that you are watching, so you might have come across the concept that when you are changing your focus that many times, like switching between apps or switching between tasks, your attention gets scattered and it takes time to refocus yourself on the new task or the new app in this case or the new activity. So much so, that you actually become less efficient. Another study has shown that actually, your stress is proportional or correlated to the amount of things that you have in your home I.E the more clutter you have the more things you have in your home the more stress you are likely to have. Now don’t quote me on this because this wasn’t part of the study but I imagine that also translates the amount of apps that you have on your phone. So the more apps that you have potentially might also increase the amount of stress that you have. In the context of work asana actually found that an over-reliant on too many apps actually led to being less efficient, mixed messages and actions and longer work hours, leading to what was termed as tool fatigue. On the other hand, the more apps you have the more notifications you have and even with a few apps constant notifications are the ultimate distraction. You can’t get into deep work and produce your best purest work if you are constantly being bothered by so many notifications coming through for different apps, some of them are not even Human, they’re just robot generated notifications. They pull you away from your work, you can’t be your most efficient and effective self if you’re constantly pandering to robots and other people’s to-do lists. But don’t just take my word for it, in the study Asana found that over half of workers felt like they had to reply immediately to notifications as they came through and just over a third felt consistently overwhelmed by persistent pings. So what can we do about this? Of course having fewer apps helps but sometimes it’s hard to know which apps are essential so I took the extreme route. I deleted all of my apps to see which ones were actually essential and this is what happened. I actually ended up missing an appointment and being late for a couple of things so I definitely need a good high quality calendar app which I can get on board with. The other thing I found is that I really like to write things down, my brain is quite busy, when I come up with an idea, so having a good note-taking system was important. I needed my basic notes app and also Notion which I use for ideas and more formulated concepts. I also couldn’t get into the gym because pure gym insists have on having a long number for your PIN code which I didn’t know and I normally just use a barcode scanner so definitely needed the gym app. Often when I’m overwhelmed will reach for a meditation on a meditation app so I ended up re-downloading the meditation app ‘Insight timer’ but actually I had a lot of other ones that I had downloaded and I didn’t re-download any of those so I actually reduced the number of meditation apps I had on my phone WhatsApp was also straight back because that’s how I speak to my family and there was other apps like Instagram and YouTube which I use all the time and I really missed so I put those back. However I did do something a little bit different which I’ll explain later on to try and manage how much I used it. One I didn’t expect to actually need but I don’t actually carry my cards around so having the Tesco Club card app was important to me and from a business perspective, Canva and just the business version of Facebook was redownloaded. I didn’t end up downloading like Facebook but I did have Messenger because that’s how I speak to my friends as well so those are the most of the apps I’ve got redownloaded. There’s a lot of apps that didn’t make the cut which was good, exactly what we wanted. The second thing I did was I actually just turned notifications off for everything so that when I actually want to access an app or want to find out what’s going on I have to actively go in and do it rather than being told to come to an app. Now although you might think oh wait someone needs to get hold of me, most of the time they’d call or text me and those notifications are still on. It’s just everything else is off so I’m not being pulled to an app by a robot or a person and to be honest nothing’s burned down yet so it’s all good. The third thing I saw got recommended in the book ‘Deep Work’ (Cal Newport) and that was to set an out of office email at all times of the day so basically just a permanent out of office and in that out of office you explain to them what days and what times you actually look at your emails which then stops you from having to reply straight away but it also just manages their expectations so they know when to expect to reply. And lastly for the extreme cases you’ve got those lock-my-phone-after-a-certain-amount-of-usage apps that you could try as well I haven’t needed to do that. I find that sometimes if I just put my phone away if I need to get focused and have to do some deep work I can just put my phone away out of sight, out of mind. I don’t have to think about it and that’s a good way for me to focus on what I need to do but there are apps out there which will lock your phone if you exceed a certain time or just lock specific apps if you exceed like 30 minutes on Instagram, for example. Let me know in the comments below if you give any of these a go and if you have tips yourself. Otherwise if you want to see what my current organizational system is this is the video right here for you but before you go if you like this video please like the video don’t forget to hit subscription button and ring that notification bell so you don’t miss any videos. I’ll see you over there! Thank youuuuu!
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