On Push Notifications

XXXVIII

2024.03.17

The biggest con of becoming a LinkedIn influencer is having to use LinkedIn.

Reactivity

In the past, I wrote about how when you are in a vulnerable mental state, you’re more inclined to react to desire and stimuli without much thought. If you’re in a very anxious or sad state, and your phone gives you a notification prompting you to scroll on Instagram, why would you not take it?

This is what cool kids call “cope” nowadays; cope is an abbreviated way to identify some behavior as a low value coping mechanism. 

I still stand by my original sentiment, but I think there’s another layer to it: you don’t need to be in an existentially vulnerable state to get caught up in doing things just to do them. Forgetting what you’re passionate about can also help you land in that no-man’s land of waiting for messages or likes or a snack or a drink or any other source of dopamine.

About half a month ago, I sort of just felt lazy.

It’s not like I wasn’t doing the actual actions I knew I needed to do to succeed, it was more like I wasn’t doing the actions I knew I needed to absolutely and utterly thrive. Perhaps autopilot is a good way to put it.

I’m talking about that feeling when you go on the run and check the box but are emotionally removed from the point of running, so you don’t bother stretching afterwards. Or pushing off updating three toggles in a CRM, or being okay with 10 minutes of doom scrolling on your phone every hour.

It just feels, for a lack of better words, soft.

One of the things that set me off kilter a bit was starting to use LinkedIn and Twitter regularly for prospecting: I reengaged in the dopamine gauntlet of social media, since it really is one of the most high leverage ways to find customers. And, along the way, I briefly forgot about doing what I actually liked to do in my free time.

Influencer Status

If you’re on LinkedIn or Twitter, you may have noticed that I came out of the woodwork and started posting. Well, I’m generating inbound and warm leads for Ultima, particularly with LinkedIn–this just means I’m getting people to come to us to try our product or at the least getting them to show interest in it by interacting with our content.

I’ve also been playing around with using Twitter a bit, though, and it’s not doing me quite as many favors.  To some extent, I started by “shit posting” to see what sticks. That’s the cool teenage or 20 something year old way of saying tweeting without much thought. I think some of it’s genuinely funny, like a thread I wrote about being chased by a doberman on the beach, but, some of it is admittedly strange:

When I started posting on the two platforms, I noticed that I short circuited my brain a bit. In moments of down time, I would open up Twitter to see who liked my tweets or who replied. And then, while the app was open, I decided I might as well look in my Twitter feed to “research” what successful tweets look like. Same thing went for LinkedIn.

And then, five minutes later, I’d realize that I just reset my brain from a productive state of creation, into a not so productive state of consumption. 

Digital Slot Machine

More generally,  by having LinkedIn and Twitter as digital slot machines to pull whenever I got bored, the lil notification buzz on my phone became more and more insidious. Whenever there was a notification, I now had a credible business reason to look at it; was it someone messaging me on LinkedIn or responding to a post? 

These things actually may warrant a quick response from me, but my phone was polluted with tons of other push notifications. So, even if I had a real reason to check to see where the message came from, there were a bunch of terrible reasons to stay on my phone even if it wasn’t the right message. 

There was so much noise, like old college club group chats on GroupMe, promotional from Uber/Lyft/DoorDash/GrubHub, and stuff from dating apps (yikes). We also have a channel in our Discord that notifies us whenever code gets pushed, which feels like it's every 30 minutes.

This seemingly inconsequential stuff was getting my attention if my brain was in the mood for distraction. “Oh, Adi pushed some code? Even though I have a much more high leverage thing to do, maybe I should check it out.” Or, “Wow, that is a great UberEats deal…”

So, I got rid of all irrelevant notifications on my phone. Now, I only get texts, calls, LinkedIn, Discord (exclusively business), and gmail. I also have added a work focus layer to reduce the number of people I actively see the texts from when I’m getting things done. Of course, sometimes, I shut off notifications entirely.

Since I made these changes maybe half a month ago and also deleted twitter off of my phone, I’ve been much more vigilant about what I consume. And, in the case of twitter, I’m being a bit more intentional with what I post. 

Passion

Managing the distractions is only part of the equation. The other part is remembering what you’d rather be doing instead of the distraction. 

If you’ve completed everything that needs to get done and have a breather, decompression is not seriously achieved by going on your phone and seeing what notifications you received. What do you actually care about, what do you actually want to fill your time up with? 

On one hand, there are the things to do each day that will make you the person you want to be. I’ve really been leaning into habit tracking this year to hold myself accountable to these actions and have been absolutely loving it. These are the things, though, that will happen regardless of how I feel, regardless of whether or not I’m excited about them. Remember: 

What happens, though, when you’ve checked everything on the list, you did the work you needed to do for the day, and you’re just sitting there? If this happens a lot, one lever to pull is to increase the quantity of some of the boxes you’re trying to check; I doubled my target deep work minutes between February and March. 

The other end of it, though, when that siren calls you to mindlessly consume, and you’re proud of a productive day, can be to do a fun thing you actually care about, whether it be going for a walk while listening to music or watching a movie or calling someone you care about. Or, something I started doing was memorizing poems I really like. 

Some of them are If by Rudyard Kipling, Invictus by William Earnest Henley, The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski, and Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas. It’s a fun thing I like to do, pacing around and reciting lines of poetry. It feels vibrant and real, and I can do it whenever.

So, if I really have nothing absolutely pressing, maybe I’ll be rambling lines from Bukowski alone in a room. The initial friction of awakening from my digital stupor might be high, but really, the choice between doing this and doom scrolling on Twitter is a no brainer. 

How can you manage time creep from the things that you don’t actually care about to make more time for the things you do care about? What is it that you’re actually even passionate about?

Live Deeply,