Editorial | Combating notification fatigue
Illustration by RUPALI INGLE, Illustrator
Ah, yes, another night of working past midnight in quarantine. You just dozed off while finishing a 10-page paper on a topic you know nothing about and started the night it was due. You clutch your cup of coffee for dear life. You didn’t have time to cook yourself a decent meal, so you snack on a stale bag of SkinnyPop Popcorn, wondering how you even got to this point and starting to question the very nature of existence. As you are teetering on the brink of officially losing it, you hear it.
DING.
It’s a noise that has come to serve as the very bane of your existence, that signals impending doom, that ignites a primal fight-or-flight response from the darkest, deepest abyss of your anxiety.
The daily Chapman COVID-19 questionnaire delivered to your Outlook inbox at 12:32 a.m. sharp.
As if the anxiety from an approaching finals week wasn’t enough, the university has a ready-made notification that never fails to remind you life still sucks. When you finally do get to sleep, waking up only starts the vicious cycle all over again; the first thing in the morning is that blaring radar of an alarm. Then you look at your phone and all its overnight notifications, breaking news, group project chats, Canvas updates and all other communication that just brings overwhelming reminders of the tiring day ahead.
We are constantly inundated with these notifications — emails, texts, calendar notifications, tweets, news sources, assignment submissions. Every “ping” initiates a little heart flutter (not the cute, fun kind when your crush laughs at something you say in a Zoom class). No, this one makes you constantly feel like you are on the edge of your seat, wondering what implications those notifications will carry along with them. They are a silent army, always ready to attack at the worst times.
Most importantly, we are bombarded by them in what’s traditionally supposed to be our comfort space. Our day starts with looking at messages in our bed and ends with Zoom classes from our couch. The pandemic has created a blur between being “home life” and “work life.” The very “working from home” concept exemplifies this. Now that we sleep, relax, work and eat all in the same place, it’s difficult to maintain a proper work-life balance when you can’t physically separate the two.
Now that much of our course load and work schedules have been brought to our homes — particularly as we prepare for finals week — we now have this constant urge to keep working all the time simply because we can.
We fall into the trap of trying to get ahead in the late hours of the night, only to be hit by work we didn’t anticipate in the coming days. It’s the “hustle” mentality that we constantly need to be providing output when there isn’t a lot of input. And every time this infernal “ding” from Outlook sounds, we’re reminded that there’s always something more to do in this purgatory state of a life we live.
We all need time to decompress from the day. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated day to self-care, because that on its own can often feel like a task. More simply, we all need to carve out both space and time to unravel ourselves from our self-imposed prison cells and put down the damn laptop.
Here are some solutions to combat notification fatigue as Chapman rounds out its spring 2021 semester:
Turn your iPhone to the Sleep Mode setting and schedule the “Do Not Disturb” function for a specified time.
Select a consistent hour to start and stop working. For example, if you don’t finish your work after 9 p.m., be OK with that and determine a time you’ll commit to picking it up the next day.
Don’t do work in your bedroom. If possible, find another room in your home or leave the building altogether and go to a park or sit outside at a coffee shop. You’ll feel much more calm when you come back to your room after a long day’s work.
Minimize the amount of notifications you receive in a day. Choose a few apps and turn off the rest.
Quit your job and move off-the-grid to a mountaintop farm somewhere in Europe. Just kidding … unless?