My Pavlov Problem

Marco Arment:

I’ve never received a push notification.

Really. It’s great. Every time that box comes up from a new app asking permission to send me push notifications, I’ve said no, because none of them have ever been important enough to interrupt me at any time of day.

The main takeaway from his post:

If your notifications are so plentiful that you can’t treat them that way, are they really that important? Do you really need to be notified?

I think I really do. Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I do. Remember Pavlov’s dogs, the famous conditioning experiment? I’ve somehow ended up the same way with notifications.¹ Every time I get a notification, a voice in my head exclaims “OMG OMG A NOTIFICATION I WONDER WHAT IT IS?!?” This is possibly a holdover from the days I ran a Cafepress store, where many emails I got alerted me to $7 profit on a T-shirt I had for sale: many emails in the past really did contain a prize. Those are gone now for the most part, but messages from friends can be as exciting, as well as shipment delivery updates because they may mean that I’ll have new stuff to play with. Every email and text message notification I get makes me a little happier inside, at least for a few seconds.

Does this help me stay productive in any way? Absolutely not, but it’s fun. It’s not just notifications - my favorite video games are the ones like Diablo or World of Warcraft where every monster you stab through the face might drop a prize.

Could I wait, and let them stack up if they’re not really important? Probably, but the effect wears off when you have 50 messages that you have to drag through. When I get two or three new RSS feed items, I read them and enjoy. When I get forty or fifty, I skim through it and hit the “Mark All As Read” button, and then I feel like a lazy bum. Treating my time like it’s worth something takes all the fun out of it, and I’m still young enough where the urge to have fun is greater than the urge to stay focused.

Maybe one day I’ll get control of myself. Despite Marco’s sound advice, today is not that day.

One more note: it seems that the iOS notification system really passively encourages you to reserve notifications for really important things, and when you don’t, the phone becomes a pain to use. Is that a good thing? In this case, probably yes. It’s also another area that contrasts with Android: its notification system will fill up and overflow with notifications if necessary, allowing the user to be as irresponsible as he/she wants to be. Just like every other aspect of Android, really.

(via marco)