Smartphones steal our time quietly. Here is the email attachment informs about a new letter: it turns out, I must know that someone has tagged in a photo on Facebook. I touch the screen, look at the photo, it's done. How much time has passed, seconds 5? Small loss. But I will return to work not 5, but about 1200 seconds later.
“Oh, this nonsense cannot be left without a sarcastic commentary ... where are these beautiful rocks? .. but I wasn't invited to the press tour ... but you got all the photos through Prisma to pass! .. ”- and after 20 minutes work it's worth it, but I know which of my colleagues and acquaintances had breakfast with what, who have already been given a new smartphone for the test, and who have not, who had a fight with whom because of this, and where who will go on the weekend.
Instead of Facebook, there could be FB, Instagram or a new game, but the situation is familiar, right? Would I agree to deliberately spend 20 minutes of time out of work on the consumption of useless information, virtual battles or other spontaneous activity? No. Someone forced me to do this? Also, it seems not. So what happened?
In the digital attention economy, the one who makes us spend more time on our website, app or game becomes rich and famous. The longer a product retains a person, the more chances its creators have to make money by engaging the user with an advertisement or in-game purchase. Not surprisingly, the hunt for attention has become a whole science, using knowledge from the fields of psychology, sociology and neurobiology to manipulate us.
Each Matrix has its own Neo. Tristan Harris ran Google's "design ethics" and "product philosophy" but quit in January 2016 to fully focus on his Time Well Spent organization. TWS's goal is to persuade IT companies to abandon the current “shadow” tricks of attracting and retaining user attention, instead helping people make informed choices and use technology to their advantage.
In a blog on the Medium platform, Harris explained how to set up a smartphone so as not to unconsciously waste time in programs, "bottomless barrels" and programs, "slot machines." This is what he calls applications with endless feeds of information that the user constantly scrolls down or automatically updates over and over again (like, for example, an email client), hoping to see something new and interesting, "winning" the coveted drop of joy.
The same that enters our brain due to the release of the pleasure hormone dopamine, for example, when receiving a "like" on Facebook or Instagram. The text you are reading right now is based on advice from Harris' blog, TED talks, and other sources.
Here are some simple tips about smartphone settings (they all apply to iPhones, most of them to Android devices) and habits that should be changed in order to use your smartphone consciously and protect your attention from being hijacked by the wizards of the digital economy by regaining the right to consciously choose how to waste time.
1. Home screen - for tools
More than half of Americans check their smartphone several times per hour or more, according to a Gallup poll. Deloitte research 2015 average is 46 times a day. In 2014, there were 33.
Even if you spend an average of a minute each time, that's 46 minutes a day or 5 hours 20 minutes a week. And if you stick to the screen not for a minute, but for two? 10 hours 40 minutes is already a whole extra working day with a lunch break and time to get to the office.
It does not play a special role whether the smartphone is unlocked with a specific intention (to write, watch, read) or simply because there is nothing to do - bright icons (and if this is an iPhone, then the haunted red circles on them , informing about something new) is inevitable attract attention, a finger unknowingly touches one of them, and welcome to the tale of wasted time.
Therefore, only the tools should be on the home screen. These are applications in which you solve specific, one-time tasks and work with which is built according to your scenario: notes, calendar, task list, weather, maps or a program for calling a taxi. An email client, by the way, can be considered a "tool" only if you receive on the strength of five letters a day. If you constantly have more emails in your inbox than you can read (let alone answer), and even a bunch of emails teasing curiosity with captivating headlines - be careful, mail can steal your time no worse than social networks.
In addition to tools, an exception can be made only for applications in which you consciously want to spend more time - for example, listening to educational podcasts, learning a foreign language, tracking the amount of water you drink, or taking breaks from work for simple exercises. But don't get carried away - the fewer the icons on the home screen, the less unnecessary "background" work the brain has to do every time the smartphone is unlocked. But what about “non-instrumental” applications that are potential attention and time consuming devices?
2. Search string = self-control
There is only one place for potential attention thieves - in the folders on the second screen. Don't worry too much about which groups you sort your icons into. The fact is that we will launch such programs through the quick search bar, entering the name of the application. On iPhones, Spotlight search is invoked by swiping from top to bottom of the screen or swiping from left to right on the home screen; many Android devices, such as the latest Sony devices, have a similar function.
Of course, it will take more time to launch the same Instagram - not half a second, but two seconds. But, first of all, it's still faster than looking for a program in the jungle of folders. Secondly, it is precisely this "complexity" of launch that we need - it will serve as a filter that cuts off the possibility of automatic, unconscious launch of the application. While your finger reaches for the F (or I) key, there will be time to think if you really want to use the next 10-30 minutes that way.
If you have iOS 9, you will have to abandon another feature invented by Apple "for convenience" - the Siri suggestions displayed below the search bar. Otherwise, there is a great risk that attention will be intercepted by one of the bright icons displayed there. Disabled here: Settings → General → Spotlight Search → Siri Suggestions.
3. The lock screen is your friend
We often unlock the phone for simple, one-time actions (take a photo, set an alarm), but when we finish with them, we are automatically distracted by certain "attention-absorbers". Make it a habit to perform these actions without unlocking the screen - from the "Control Center" on the iPhone (called up by swiping up from the bottom of the screen) or using the lock screen shortcuts on Android.
After the deed is done, the smartphone will remain blocked and the risk of falling into the rabbit hole of the next game or social network will be lower. It is safest to lock the screen with a pin code and the fingerprint sensor, which makes unlocking instant, not to use.
On iPhone, from Control Center, you can launch a camera or calculator, set an alarm, and turn on a flashlight. This, by the way, means that it will be possible to remove the icons of the camera, calculator and clock from the home screen, making it even more minimalistic.
Android smartphones from different companies and with different versions of the OS have different screen interfaces, and if you wish, you can find a program that replaces the standard lock screen and can place application shortcuts on it. But at least the launch of the camera without unlocking has been provided for several years by all manufacturers of Android devices, on some models this can also be done by long pressing the volume key.
4. Two screens are enough, and hide the colored wrappers
Unlock the phone, look at the main screen for a second, flick five screens to the left, then back, do nothing, lock back. Have you noticed such seemingly illogical behavior? In fact, our brain does this when it would prefer to postpone another, more important matter for various reasons and along the way get a small reward, seeing bright multi-colored icons and, if we are lucky, signaling new messages or likes red circles ...
To avoid this, there should be only two screens: the first with "tools" and the second with folders in which all other programs are hidden. And on the first panel of the folder we leave one application (preferably the most "uninteresting", with a black and white icon), the rest are sent to the second and further - all the same, I remind you, we agreed to launch them through the search. The purpose of such a cleanup of folders is to reduce the color of icons that tempts the brain and reduce the risk of unknowingly launching some kind of "time killer".
Harris explains this action using the example of the M & M's experiment at Google. As you know, the search engine does not skimp on free food for employees in the office. There were also large transparent jars of M & M's glazed chocolates. The candies themselves are bright, plus on the cans there were stickers with the usual logo and packaging, the images of which have been hammered into the heads of not the first generation with the help of advertising, so the cans were emptied quickly. Not that the search engine was sorry for the money for candy, but the losses from the disability of employees who undermined their health with harmful food could be much higher.
Google decided to put M & M's in opaque white jars, providing them with simple information labels with the name of the contents and information about the nutritional value, and placed fruit in transparent jars next to them (this increased the likelihood of people making informed choices ). The result exceeded all expectations. In seven weeks, each employee had an average of nine standard store-bought M & M's bags in less than the seven weeks leading up to the experiment. In total, during this time, Google users "lacked" 3.1 million calories.
Icons serve the same function in the app economy as flamboyant packaging does in an economy that brings disease and death to junk food. Remember how the Instagram icon was redrawn recently? There is no trace of the old retro modesty. The designers did their best to make the heart-rending rainbow icon the most noticeable on the screen, caught the eye of hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of fingers reflexively reached for it ... and at the end of the quarter, Facebook delighted investors with an increase in user activity indicators.
5. Notifications: to people - yes, to non-people - no
We figured it out with the reduction of the risk of "leakage" of attention when applications do not actively try to "steal" it. But what to do when the smartphone bothers us with notifications? The main thing is to minimize the “non-living” signals from applications and services, leaving only those that came from real people. According to Gloria Mark, one of the leading researchers in the psychology of software user interaction at the University of California at Irvine, each “distraction” costs us 23 minutes of time, during which we have to refocus on the task at hand. Moreover, the more often we are distracted, the more often we want to be distracted ourselves by looking at Instagram, Facebook or a news site.
Of course, notifications from messengers should be left on (for live people, not for bots in Telegram). For everything else, like Instagram and Facebook, you need to disable them - of course, if you want to work with these services on your own terms, and not in the way their creators would like them to. And turn it off for mail too - there will always be unread letters in your mailboxes. If you urgently need someone - do not worry, they will call you or drop an SMS very soon without receiving an answer immediately. Moreover, I would also turn off the sticker on the mail badge. After all, how many letters out of a hundred turn out to be really important? Five? Oh, and one more thing - take half an hour of your time and unsubscribe from all mailing lists, except those that you find really useful.
Set up notifications in iOS for each app: Settings → Notifications. Android 5.0 and higher: Settings → Sounds and notifications → App notifications. Also, you can get to the screen for disabling notifications for a specific program in Android 5 or 6 by long pressing the notification, after which you need to touch i on the right side of the plate.
"What if you miss something important?" Before the massive spread of mobile phones 20 years ago and, later, smartphones, people lived without any problems in a world that was not so different from ours today. And they survived, so nothing terrible will happen due to the disabling of notifications.
6. Understandable vibrations
Sometimes we put the smartphone in vibration mode, not only so as not to disturb others, but also in the hope that this way it will be less distracting. This is unlikely. Each activation of the vibration motor generates a thought: what was it? A letter from your boss? SMS from your wife? Facebook comment? Moreover, it often seems to us that the smartphone vibrated, even when it actually was not.
Unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android allow setting an individual vibration type for each application, not to mention each contact in each messenger and mail client (and this would be a good thing to fix). But for calls and SMS / iMessage, you can not only choose a vibration "pattern" from several ready-made options, but also write your own unique pattern by pressing your finger on the screen.
For Android, there is the LightFlow app, originally designed to flexibly control the alert LED found on many Google smartphones. Apart from this, it also allows you to set your own vibration pattern for each of the supported applications. Unfortunately, it does not work for all applications and not on all smartphones, so before buying the full version for 149 rubles, you should try to install the free version with restrictions.
7. Buy an alarm clock
Anything - the main thing is to keep up and call. You will be surprised how life will change if you do not meet and see off every day with a smartphone in hand, but charge it in the room next to the bedroom. The notifications that we see first thing in the morning after tearing our eyes set the tone for the day. In the evening, looking at the smartphone screen is generally contraindicated if you do not want to earn problems with falling asleep.
***
If all of the above manipulations seem unnatural to you, you are right. It doesn't have to be that way. If the operating systems of smartphones and computer browsers were designed differently, it would be easier for people to stay focused on their tasks, they would experience less stress, they would not have to constantly choose between work and family, and they would have a better chance of realizing their dreams. After all, it is mobile devices, computers, their OS and the browsers and communication applications running on them that mediate between people and players of the "attention economy" striving for success, exchanging our time with you for the money of venture capitalists.
Remember when a study came out a couple of years ago that proved the negative effect of the blue glow of the screens of mobile devices on the quality of sleep? At the same time, applications like Sunset or f began to appear. lux trying to solve this problem. The issue attracted the attention of the press, was widely discussed, in the end it became clear: people want such a function at the OS level and the one who implements it will look better than competitors.
Bottom line: "night mode", shifting shades to the red side of the spectrum, is already in the latest version of iOS and will soon appear in the new Android N. It turns out that Apple and Google know how to make their operating systems not only more functional, but also more humane - the main thing is that in companies realized the need for change. Now you understand why it is so important to share this text.
“Oh, this nonsense cannot be left without a sarcastic commentary ... where are these beautiful rocks? .. but I wasn't invited to the press tour ... but you got all the photos through Prisma to pass! .. ”- and after 20 minutes work it's worth it, but I know which of my colleagues and acquaintances had breakfast with what, who have already been given a new smartphone for the test, and who have not, who had a fight with whom because of this, and where who will go on the weekend.
Instead of Facebook, there could be FB, Instagram or a new game, but the situation is familiar, right? Would I agree to deliberately spend 20 minutes of time out of work on the consumption of useless information, virtual battles or other spontaneous activity? No. Someone forced me to do this? Also, it seems not. So what happened?
In the digital attention economy, the one who makes us spend more time on our website, app or game becomes rich and famous. The longer a product retains a person, the more chances its creators have to make money by engaging the user with an advertisement or in-game purchase. Not surprisingly, the hunt for attention has become a whole science, using knowledge from the fields of psychology, sociology and neurobiology to manipulate us.
Each Matrix has its own Neo. Tristan Harris ran Google's "design ethics" and "product philosophy" but quit in January 2016 to fully focus on his Time Well Spent organization. TWS's goal is to persuade IT companies to abandon the current “shadow” tricks of attracting and retaining user attention, instead helping people make informed choices and use technology to their advantage.
In a blog on the Medium platform, Harris explained how to set up a smartphone so as not to unconsciously waste time in programs, "bottomless barrels" and programs, "slot machines." This is what he calls applications with endless feeds of information that the user constantly scrolls down or automatically updates over and over again (like, for example, an email client), hoping to see something new and interesting, "winning" the coveted drop of joy.
The same that enters our brain due to the release of the pleasure hormone dopamine, for example, when receiving a "like" on Facebook or Instagram. The text you are reading right now is based on advice from Harris' blog, TED talks, and other sources.
Here are some simple tips about smartphone settings (they all apply to iPhones, most of them to Android devices) and habits that should be changed in order to use your smartphone consciously and protect your attention from being hijacked by the wizards of the digital economy by regaining the right to consciously choose how to waste time.
1. Home screen - for tools
More than half of Americans check their smartphone several times per hour or more, according to a Gallup poll. Deloitte research 2015 average is 46 times a day. In 2014, there were 33.
Even if you spend an average of a minute each time, that's 46 minutes a day or 5 hours 20 minutes a week. And if you stick to the screen not for a minute, but for two? 10 hours 40 minutes is already a whole extra working day with a lunch break and time to get to the office.
It does not play a special role whether the smartphone is unlocked with a specific intention (to write, watch, read) or simply because there is nothing to do - bright icons (and if this is an iPhone, then the haunted red circles on them , informing about something new) is inevitable attract attention, a finger unknowingly touches one of them, and welcome to the tale of wasted time.
Therefore, only the tools should be on the home screen. These are applications in which you solve specific, one-time tasks and work with which is built according to your scenario: notes, calendar, task list, weather, maps or a program for calling a taxi. An email client, by the way, can be considered a "tool" only if you receive on the strength of five letters a day. If you constantly have more emails in your inbox than you can read (let alone answer), and even a bunch of emails teasing curiosity with captivating headlines - be careful, mail can steal your time no worse than social networks.
In addition to tools, an exception can be made only for applications in which you consciously want to spend more time - for example, listening to educational podcasts, learning a foreign language, tracking the amount of water you drink, or taking breaks from work for simple exercises. But don't get carried away - the fewer the icons on the home screen, the less unnecessary "background" work the brain has to do every time the smartphone is unlocked. But what about “non-instrumental” applications that are potential attention and time consuming devices?
2. Search string = self-control
There is only one place for potential attention thieves - in the folders on the second screen. Don't worry too much about which groups you sort your icons into. The fact is that we will launch such programs through the quick search bar, entering the name of the application. On iPhones, Spotlight search is invoked by swiping from top to bottom of the screen or swiping from left to right on the home screen; many Android devices, such as the latest Sony devices, have a similar function.
Of course, it will take more time to launch the same Instagram - not half a second, but two seconds. But, first of all, it's still faster than looking for a program in the jungle of folders. Secondly, it is precisely this "complexity" of launch that we need - it will serve as a filter that cuts off the possibility of automatic, unconscious launch of the application. While your finger reaches for the F (or I) key, there will be time to think if you really want to use the next 10-30 minutes that way.
If you have iOS 9, you will have to abandon another feature invented by Apple "for convenience" - the Siri suggestions displayed below the search bar. Otherwise, there is a great risk that attention will be intercepted by one of the bright icons displayed there. Disabled here: Settings → General → Spotlight Search → Siri Suggestions.
3. The lock screen is your friend
We often unlock the phone for simple, one-time actions (take a photo, set an alarm), but when we finish with them, we are automatically distracted by certain "attention-absorbers". Make it a habit to perform these actions without unlocking the screen - from the "Control Center" on the iPhone (called up by swiping up from the bottom of the screen) or using the lock screen shortcuts on Android.
After the deed is done, the smartphone will remain blocked and the risk of falling into the rabbit hole of the next game or social network will be lower. It is safest to lock the screen with a pin code and the fingerprint sensor, which makes unlocking instant, not to use.
On iPhone, from Control Center, you can launch a camera or calculator, set an alarm, and turn on a flashlight. This, by the way, means that it will be possible to remove the icons of the camera, calculator and clock from the home screen, making it even more minimalistic.
Android smartphones from different companies and with different versions of the OS have different screen interfaces, and if you wish, you can find a program that replaces the standard lock screen and can place application shortcuts on it. But at least the launch of the camera without unlocking has been provided for several years by all manufacturers of Android devices, on some models this can also be done by long pressing the volume key.
4. Two screens are enough, and hide the colored wrappers
Unlock the phone, look at the main screen for a second, flick five screens to the left, then back, do nothing, lock back. Have you noticed such seemingly illogical behavior? In fact, our brain does this when it would prefer to postpone another, more important matter for various reasons and along the way get a small reward, seeing bright multi-colored icons and, if we are lucky, signaling new messages or likes red circles ...
To avoid this, there should be only two screens: the first with "tools" and the second with folders in which all other programs are hidden. And on the first panel of the folder we leave one application (preferably the most "uninteresting", with a black and white icon), the rest are sent to the second and further - all the same, I remind you, we agreed to launch them through the search. The purpose of such a cleanup of folders is to reduce the color of icons that tempts the brain and reduce the risk of unknowingly launching some kind of "time killer".
Harris explains this action using the example of the M & M's experiment at Google. As you know, the search engine does not skimp on free food for employees in the office. There were also large transparent jars of M & M's glazed chocolates. The candies themselves are bright, plus on the cans there were stickers with the usual logo and packaging, the images of which have been hammered into the heads of not the first generation with the help of advertising, so the cans were emptied quickly. Not that the search engine was sorry for the money for candy, but the losses from the disability of employees who undermined their health with harmful food could be much higher.
Google decided to put M & M's in opaque white jars, providing them with simple information labels with the name of the contents and information about the nutritional value, and placed fruit in transparent jars next to them (this increased the likelihood of people making informed choices ). The result exceeded all expectations. In seven weeks, each employee had an average of nine standard store-bought M & M's bags in less than the seven weeks leading up to the experiment. In total, during this time, Google users "lacked" 3.1 million calories.
Icons serve the same function in the app economy as flamboyant packaging does in an economy that brings disease and death to junk food. Remember how the Instagram icon was redrawn recently? There is no trace of the old retro modesty. The designers did their best to make the heart-rending rainbow icon the most noticeable on the screen, caught the eye of hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of fingers reflexively reached for it ... and at the end of the quarter, Facebook delighted investors with an increase in user activity indicators.
5. Notifications: to people - yes, to non-people - no
We figured it out with the reduction of the risk of "leakage" of attention when applications do not actively try to "steal" it. But what to do when the smartphone bothers us with notifications? The main thing is to minimize the “non-living” signals from applications and services, leaving only those that came from real people. According to Gloria Mark, one of the leading researchers in the psychology of software user interaction at the University of California at Irvine, each “distraction” costs us 23 minutes of time, during which we have to refocus on the task at hand. Moreover, the more often we are distracted, the more often we want to be distracted ourselves by looking at Instagram, Facebook or a news site.
Of course, notifications from messengers should be left on (for live people, not for bots in Telegram). For everything else, like Instagram and Facebook, you need to disable them - of course, if you want to work with these services on your own terms, and not in the way their creators would like them to. And turn it off for mail too - there will always be unread letters in your mailboxes. If you urgently need someone - do not worry, they will call you or drop an SMS very soon without receiving an answer immediately. Moreover, I would also turn off the sticker on the mail badge. After all, how many letters out of a hundred turn out to be really important? Five? Oh, and one more thing - take half an hour of your time and unsubscribe from all mailing lists, except those that you find really useful.
Set up notifications in iOS for each app: Settings → Notifications. Android 5.0 and higher: Settings → Sounds and notifications → App notifications. Also, you can get to the screen for disabling notifications for a specific program in Android 5 or 6 by long pressing the notification, after which you need to touch i on the right side of the plate.
"What if you miss something important?" Before the massive spread of mobile phones 20 years ago and, later, smartphones, people lived without any problems in a world that was not so different from ours today. And they survived, so nothing terrible will happen due to the disabling of notifications.
6. Understandable vibrations
Sometimes we put the smartphone in vibration mode, not only so as not to disturb others, but also in the hope that this way it will be less distracting. This is unlikely. Each activation of the vibration motor generates a thought: what was it? A letter from your boss? SMS from your wife? Facebook comment? Moreover, it often seems to us that the smartphone vibrated, even when it actually was not.
Unfortunately, neither iOS nor Android allow setting an individual vibration type for each application, not to mention each contact in each messenger and mail client (and this would be a good thing to fix). But for calls and SMS / iMessage, you can not only choose a vibration "pattern" from several ready-made options, but also write your own unique pattern by pressing your finger on the screen.
For Android, there is the LightFlow app, originally designed to flexibly control the alert LED found on many Google smartphones. Apart from this, it also allows you to set your own vibration pattern for each of the supported applications. Unfortunately, it does not work for all applications and not on all smartphones, so before buying the full version for 149 rubles, you should try to install the free version with restrictions.
7. Buy an alarm clock
Anything - the main thing is to keep up and call. You will be surprised how life will change if you do not meet and see off every day with a smartphone in hand, but charge it in the room next to the bedroom. The notifications that we see first thing in the morning after tearing our eyes set the tone for the day. In the evening, looking at the smartphone screen is generally contraindicated if you do not want to earn problems with falling asleep.
***
If all of the above manipulations seem unnatural to you, you are right. It doesn't have to be that way. If the operating systems of smartphones and computer browsers were designed differently, it would be easier for people to stay focused on their tasks, they would experience less stress, they would not have to constantly choose between work and family, and they would have a better chance of realizing their dreams. After all, it is mobile devices, computers, their OS and the browsers and communication applications running on them that mediate between people and players of the "attention economy" striving for success, exchanging our time with you for the money of venture capitalists.
Remember when a study came out a couple of years ago that proved the negative effect of the blue glow of the screens of mobile devices on the quality of sleep? At the same time, applications like Sunset or f began to appear. lux trying to solve this problem. The issue attracted the attention of the press, was widely discussed, in the end it became clear: people want such a function at the OS level and the one who implements it will look better than competitors.
Bottom line: "night mode", shifting shades to the red side of the spectrum, is already in the latest version of iOS and will soon appear in the new Android N. It turns out that Apple and Google know how to make their operating systems not only more functional, but also more humane - the main thing is that in companies realized the need for change. Now you understand why it is so important to share this text.
