'Wasaps' from your boss, your cousin, the group of parents at school: the madness of living under the barrage of notifications

Ana Galvan

The number of unread emails that we accumulate in the inbox is 1,602, and 47, the number of

seen and unanswered that we have on the phone.

These figures are the average calculated by a report by the consulting firm Kantar.

Some of us will carry more or less heavy loads, but in all cases these unattended demands are a cognitive burden that exhausts us.

Someone expects something from us and their prayers will never be answered because we have entered a mental economy of war.

A good part of these requests will end up in a drawer that we will call Noise: everything that does not require an immediate response or requires some reflection, everything that arrives at a bad time or is too long will remain unanswered and, probably, forever. .

Because the next day we will have a new battery of urgent demands to manage.

Between

, WhatsApp, Instagram, Slack or any other instant messaging application, we live under the bombardment of notifications and urgent demands, messages that come and go.

A social and labor table tennis that we must not let die on our roof in any way, blurs the borders between work and private life... At some point during the day we activate the Noise function, then we respond with autopilot, more out of exhaustion than for laziness

"We have become empathetic reaction machines," warns Geert Lovink in his book

(Consonni, 2019).

But even the machines need to be unplugged.

To manage the barrage of information that reaches us through multiple channels, we have to constantly change our focus.

“Our brain is not very good at changing contexts and it gets exhausted.

Constantly checking email and

on the phone to keep up with our conversations on different platforms reduces our cognitive capacity, ”observes Cal Newport, professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and author of

(Peninsula, 2022).

A study on telecommuting published in

in 2021 warned that "digital noise generates confusion, loss of control, stress, inefficient processing of information, and even an increase in depressive symptoms."

"Constantly checking e-mail and 'scrolling' on the phone to keep up with our conversations reduces our cognitive capacity"

Cal Newport, Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University

In these circumstances, neuroscientists say that it is more difficult to encode memories.

If we add to this that we are coming out of a pandemic where we have lived many the same days, it is easy to understand why it is difficult for us to remember something specific in the face of so much uniformity.

This is how we have begun to forget little things: names of co-workers that we see again after two years of Zoom, organs of the body, places we have visited, titles of books we have read, anecdotes we have told many times.

Small memory holes that surprise us, more than anyone, ourselves, who, according to the Kantar report, in 2016 we looked at the phone on average 80 times a day, and in 2021 we already did it 262 times.

In the United States, only 43% of people say that they have read all the messages sent to them.

The

, a bad practice previously restricted to the world of dating, can also be a neuroprotective factor against the avalanche of

, emails, Zoom calls, Teams, Meet that expect to find us available to make decisions of all kinds in time real.

The rule is to have several conversations at the same time, not finish any of them and, above all, leave the most trusted people hanging.

And it makes us all feel bad because another characteristic of our noise-addled personality is that we are terrified of silence.

Emily Balcetis, professor of psychology at New York University, has observed that not responding, or simply not reacting to our demand quickly enough, has "a disproportionate impact on our well-being."

However, to reduce the interactions that come and go, some experts claim to ignore messages and abandon the rules of civility of a face-to-face conversation on the Internet.

The continuous “thank you”, “hello”, “see you later” and other courtesy formulas also deconcentrate, exhaust and force you to answer back with more “thank you” and more “see you later”.

A study by the energy company OVO in the United Kingdom ensures that if each British adult sent one less

message, 16,433 tons of coal would be saved per year, the equivalent of removing 3,334 diesel cars from the roads.

Even in small offices people prefer to send an email

or a

to get up, walk the few meters that separate you from the recipient and talk.

Professor Newport explains: “In the first moment, the default email is used because it is easier and generates less friction —in addition, there is a record and it can be copied to half the organization chart—, the problem is that that first email generates a chain of back and forth messages that forces you to continually follow the thread of the conversation to be informed.

Each of these quick checks induces a context switch in the brain and reduces its cognitive ability for 10 to 15 minutes.

So if every 5 minutes we have to review and update the conversation, we end up literally exhausted and groggy."

Cal Newport is one of the experts who recommend "triaging" messages.

In his latest book,

, still unpublished in Spanish, he describes the communication dynamics that trap us at work.

“The title is a bit confusing”, he clarifies, via

, by the way, “my goal is not to eliminate email, but rather the style of work that has been built in recent years on the basis of endless chains of messages, all urgent.

Newport proposes, in his new book, to restructure teamwork so that it does not depend on instant messaging or

interactions .

“We need alternative collaboration processes that don't involve keeping message traffic alive.

Something as simple as regulating office hours when people can exchange face-to-face instead of emailing could eliminate hundreds of messages a week that would otherwise have to be read and responded to as quickly as possible.”

Considered by

the Mari Kondo of technology, Newport is the creator of a method that he has called "deep work" and that he develops in his book

, a manifesto of resistance to being permanently connected that has become an international bestseller.

His theory shows that working focused and without distraction is the only way to create new and valuable things, and little value in the market.

Carl Honoré is one of the world leaders of the Slow movement.

More than 15 years ago he began advocating slow down, stop, breathe.

In a telephone conversation he remembers that the Blackberry was conquering the world at the time.

"It was so addictive we called it Crackberry."

In his TED talks he assures that in a world of speed addicts our superpower is slowness, and he advocates applying the principles of the Slow movement to technology.

“Slow means putting quality over quantity, being present, savoring the minutes and seconds instead of counting them, dedicating your time and energy to the things that really matter, and doing everything the best, not the fastest, possible," he argues.

In 2019, Dmitry Minkovsky started working on a slow email service, he wanted to design a braking mechanism to restore the illusion of receiving a message.

He called it Pony and, at the moment, it is a conceptual and experimental project against the oppression of the instantaneity of the internet.

Think of an

that arrives by post.

We write a message and leave it in the outbox.

Once a day (you can choose morning, afternoon or evening) Pony picks up our shipments and leaves whatever they have delivered for us.

Minkovsky, a chemical engineer who has worked in the financial sector, is not enlightened, he wants his invention to grow and make money: "Obviously, Pony will never be Instagram, because surveillance capitalism is difficult to build if you are not giving people a constant task or a list of things to react to,” he told

.

He fantasizes about the return of a weekly print newsletter distributed through Pony and financed by advertising.

Does it ring a bell?

“All examples of the 'slow web' have failed, and the 'fast web' is faster, more frenetic and more addictive than ever.

The slow version of the internet is dead.

Jack Chen, writer

The first idea to create a slower version of the internet arose in 2010, just when broadband and

coincided in this world , and we began to live intensively connected.

The movement went on to design several

projects , defined by the writer Jack Cheng as “an international design philosophy that, in principle, would short-circuit the assumption of a 24-hour

life ”.

In 2016, with the death of blogging declared, Cheng wrote: “All examples of the

have failed, and the

is faster, heavier, and more addictive than ever.

The slow version of the internet is dead.

However, between 2019 and 2022, in addition to Minkovsky's slow

, other projects have emerged such as Slow Messenger, created by the Near Future Laboratory;

and Minus, the finite social network, which only allows you to post 100

in your lifetime.

All have arisen from the conviction that the Internet, as we know it today, is impossible to follow.

In 2022 slowness is a subversive idea.

Note that everything that generates noise and automation is still considered disruptive today.

Choose your adjective in life.

The method to work thoroughly

Working in depth is not a nostalgic demand of writers and philosophers from the beginning of the 20th century.

It is a skill that has great value in modern life.”

In his book Focus (Peninsula, 2022), Cal Newport explains why focus is the superpower of the new economy.

One of them is scarcity, there are fewer and fewer individuals capable of abstracting from distractions in order to bring their cognitive abilities to the maximum.

Paradoxically, only people who cultivate this aptitude will be able to learn complicated things in a short time, one of the demands of the information economy, which is based on complex systems that change rapidly. 

The theory of this book is that in the long term, it will not be the stars of social networks or Excel who will succeed—“superficial tasks that are usually executed in the midst of distractions and that are easy to replicate”—but those who make deep work the mainstay. of his career. 

Newport has been the first guinea pig of his method.

Her inspiration was a fellow MacArthur Fellow at MIT.

A theoretical scientist who spent many hours in silence looking at his notes.

He did not have a Twitter account and did not answer emails from strangers.

In one year he had published 16 academic essays. 

Newport made a similar commitment to depth.

He does not have social networks and does not access the internet by default, he had his first smartphone after an ultimatum from his pregnant wife and is reported by NPR, the public radio of the United States, and the print edition of The Washington Post, which receives in his house.

Spoiler alert: Cal Newport is not an old man, he was born in 1982, he is more of a millennial.

His deep working method has borne the following fruits in 10 years: four books, a Ph.D., several peer-reviewed academic essays, and a permanent position as Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University.

All this without working past six in the evening. 

“It was possible for me to organize this tight schedule thanks to the fact that I made efforts to minimize the superficial in my life (…).

I organize my days around a carefully chosen nucleus of deep work, and I place on the periphery (…) the superficial activities that I cannot avoid, ”he says in his book.

His conclusion is that "three or four hours a day of concentrated and uninterrupted work for five days a week produce very valuable results."

His rules are four: work in depth, open the doors to boredom, stay away from social networks and eliminate the superficial. 

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