Dealing with random candy attraction aka dopamine email effect.
The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful reply to your comment.
Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start, but far from enough if we are to keep increasing our connectivity with the world.
I'm skeptical that there will be a good enough technological solution for this, which makes it all the more scary (scale/reach problems).
I advise to only check email/IM/what have you once a day at most. In the evening, when you have done the meaningful work. Don't use notifications. Only launch email, IM client when you need them.
See Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule if you haven't:
This is something I have thought about as well, I think its 2 problems, notifications and filtering, I have gmail notifier but it would be nicer to see it come natively to more apps (facebook / twitter / email / comments)
and filtering which is much harder and specific to each application
The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful reply to your comment.
Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start, but far from enough if we are to keep increasing our connectivity with the world.
I'm skeptical that there will be a good enough technological solution for this, which makes it all the more scary (scale/reach problems).