Latest / The Mastery Project Podcast / What Ignoring a Notification Actually Costs: Phone Alerts, Focus, and Attention
Transcript
- Dr. T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D.: I spent over 10 years in higher education directing an Allied health education program and teaching adult students. During that time, I had numerous conversations with students about how to effectively study and engage deeply with the work they were being asked to do. Now, I want to mention that the stakes in these programs that I'm talking about are often incredibly high. And we're not just talking about how to pass a quiz or perform on a practical exam. These programs like physical therapy, occupational therapy, nursing, medical school, et cetera, require sustained effort and deep focused study over long periods of time with the eventual goal of passing a rigorous board exam and ultimately safely treating patients. Inevitably, students would come into my office completely frustrated because they've just spent weeks grinding through heavy study sessions. Sometimes for long hours, and yet they simply struggle to retain what they've studied or obtain the grade that they hoped for. And we're talking about highly capable students who, in a lot of cases, have already completed other academic degrees. In other words, most of these students are excellent students with the right motivation and intention to learn. And conversations with them about their preparation almost always evolved into discussions about their phone. I'd always ask them. While you're studying, where is your phone? And almost without fail, they would immediately defend themselves. I didn't even touch it the whole time. I just had it face down on the desk. And I used to tell them that they needed to leave their phone in another room entirely, or at least put it in airplane mode and put it out of sight. And at the time, I usually framed this around the concept of something called attention residue, or the idea that just knowing your phone's an active channel to the outside world. Kind of leaves a piece of your cognitive capacity stuck on that device, always anticipating the next alert, the next message, or the next distraction. But the truth is the problem is actually much more immediate and automatic than that. And it starts with a very common misconception. One of the easiest ways to feel disciplined as it relates to your phone is to hear it buzz, see the screen light up, and then not touch it. Instead of reflexively reaching for your device, you keep working, you ignore it, and because you never actually opened your phone, it feels reasonable to assume that there's no real impact on your focus and attention. In fact, you did the right thing, right? You didn't let some intrusion into your work interrupt you and you just continued. That sounds like it should be a good thing. But is it actually as harmless as we assume? Research suggests that it may not be. In a fascinating study from 2015, researchers had people sit at a computer doing some highly tedious tasks like repetitively pressing a button every time a number flashed on their screen, except for specific numbers. It was precision work and it required a lot of continuous focus and sustained attention. And while the participants were doing this, the researchers were texting or calling their phones intentionally. But here's the important part. The participants never actually interacted with their phones. They didn't read the messages or answer the calls that they that came in. And just hearing the notification was often enough to break their concentration and make their performance suffer in terms of accuracy and committing errors. That is a really important finding because it separates two things we often treat as the same: responding to an interruption and being interrupted by it. What a lot of people don't realize is that a notification can capture your attention even without requiring you to pick up your phone. So the sound or vibration alerts you, your brain registers it as a change in your environment. And before you consciously decide if it requires your attention or not, your brain's already processed it. Sometimes a notification triggers a little internal monologue. Was that my wife? Why is she messaging me right now? She's supposed to be playing tennis. I wonder if she's okay. Is that that email I've been waiting for? Ugh, I hope that isn't my boss asking me for that report for the hundredth time today. We've all had these little conversations with ourselves, and they might take only a second or two, but they definitely occur. But even when you successfully suppress the urge to look and keep working when these come in, you still pay what researchers call An attentional cost. This is the mental price your brain pays to briefly disengage from whatever cognitively demanding thing you happen to be working on at the time. And it results in a hidden reconstruction cost. Even if you never touched your phone, that split second departure in focus drains your cognitive resources. You end up paying the fee in lost time and increased errors as you scramble to recover your train of thought, reread a paragraph, or remember what you are about to do next. This particular thing happens to me way more than I care to admit. And it can be extremely frustrating because now you've been derailed from your task, and in my case, the likelihood of task switching increases, which is a different problem for another episode. Now, none of this necessarily means one notification will ruin your concentration entirely. That would be an overstatement. But a better question to ask here is what happens when this becomes an ongoing occurrence throughout the day? If your phone asks for your attention 40 times, then even successfully ignoring all 40 notifications still means you're constantly paying that fee. When you consider the full balance of that cost as it slowly paid throughout the day, what was the impact on your work? How much of it was completed during a period of distraction? Or better yet, how much better could your work product have been if you weren't paying an attentional cost every 10 minutes? That question leads directly to another study conducted in 2019 that offers a finding that I think can even be more useful for understanding how to manage this. Researchers in this study took participants out of the lab and ran a two-week field experiment. They wanted to see what happens when they altered how smartphone alerts are delivered to the participants in this study. So they split people into three groups. The first received notifications normally. The second received them clustered together in scheduled batches, and then a final group had their notifications turned off entirely. The interesting result that came out of this study was that completely eliminating notifications wasn't clearly the best solution. The group that received notifications in predictable batches each day reported feeling more attentive, more in control of their phones, and less stressed than people. Receiving the notifications as usual did. But the people who received no notifications at all experienced more anxiety and a fear of missing out. So the lesson here is really more precise than just put your phone in airplane mode or turn it off entirely, as I used to tell my students. The problem of attentional cost may be less about the existence of notifications as they come in and more about allowing unrelated information to arrive unpredictably. And constantly pull your focus away. That suggests a much better question to ask when you set up your phone or when considering how to alter your settings. Which things actually deserve the right to interrupt me immediately? A call from your child's school? Absolutely. A security alert? Of course. That Amazon Prime notice about a price drop on a product you were looking at two weeks ago? Probably doesn't. Most email probably doesn't, and social media almost never needs immediate access to you every time something occurs. The goal here isn't to try to insulate your brain from every interruption. That would be unreasonable and likely not even possible. The real goal is to stop giving every app on your phone an equal opportunity to create a distraction that pulls you away from meaningful work. Ignoring a notification can certainly be a successful act of self-control, but an even better strategy is designing your environment so you don't have to rely on self-control in the first place, which is exactly how I used to counsel my students. By deliberately controlling your digital environment, you optimize your focus, your time on task, and ultimately the quality of the work that you produce. I'm Dr. T. Michael Dougherty This has been the Mastery Brief. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.