Over the last year, I've read a lot of stories regarding uninstalling your social media apps from your phone or disabling notifications but, until very recently, I didn't pay much attention to any of this. I'm a teenager and everyone at my age intensively uses their phone; I thought. It's not like I'm being distracted from my job or anything, right?
Well, then my grades arrived and it turns out I do have a job: studying and getting good marks. The problem is that you need to be extremely focused to be able to memorize stuff and I'm not good at concentrating especially with an internet connection😅.
I started researching on how to concentrate and to avoid distractions and found out some great resources like Brain.fm (because apparently metal isn't good for studying, who'd have guessed) but I still wasn't able to completely focus on my books.
One day, CleanMyMac accidentally closed Discord and Whatsapp. When I was going to bed, I noticed I had been a lot more focused and realized that I hadn't received any messages during my study and, because I thought I had the apps open and notifications would appear, I didn't bother checking them.
That was the moment I understood the "delete your social media apps" advice. Today's platforms are built to be instant and you're mean to treat them synchronously: If I received a notification, I'd stop what I was doing to reply or retweet.
You have to go async. When you're working, you don't need to know if someone messaged you. Disable notifications. When you're done (when you want to know if someone messaged you) open the app. It shouldn't depend on the availability of information but on your willingness to receive that information.
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Top comments (6)
Hey Miguel! Great article! Well, I'm having a lot of trouble focusing right now, and I'm also not very motivated to code, so yep, I'm having a hard time. But your article gave me some ideas about how to find my focus again! Tomorrow I'm going to try turning off my notifications for an hour, and focus on my studies/projects! Thank you for sharing your experiences :)
Good luck!
Thank you!
This is a good post and congratulations for having the insight that perhaps you should cut down on some of the social media time, specially at your age.
I always keep my mac, phone and watch on a permanent
do not disturbmode the only thing I allow is calls and text messages because I barely get any calls and only get text messages from people that are important to me.When I forget to activate the do not disturb mode on my mac (usually after i reboot the machine) I tend to spend much more time doing meaningless tasks due to the notifications - funny enough I can't stand them and after about 2 minutes i switch the dnd mode back on haha
Check out Self Control if you need to do some research online for assignments but keep distracting websites away! I used this a ton when a project deadline or exam was coming up.
For a couple of seconds I though it was related to Golang 😁