Keen to cure your addiction to the small screen? Alex Beattie has some quickfire suggestions.
A flash on your screen, a ‘vrrrr’ in your pocket, the universal ‘DING’. The digital world is rife with distractions, some of which are by design. Thanks to smartphones and social media, we live in an attention economy where the likes of the New Zealand Herald, Facebook and Google all compete for our eyeballs. Here are a few tips to fight this menace!
Turn-off the blue ticks
Another distraction is the urge to communicate. In 2014, WhatsApp quietly introduced read receipts, letting people see exactly when their message was read and not just received. This unwittingly created a pressure to respond, as the alternative was to come across as rude.
To reply on your own terms and turn this WhatsApp feature off, visit Settings > Account > Privacy and uncheck ‘Read Receipts’. Similarly, to turn off this feature on Messages on iPhones, visit Settings > Messages and uncheck ‘Send Read Receipts’.
Unfortunately, this feature cannot be disabled on Facebook Messenger.
Only keep notifications on from people
Notifications are at the top of the list of distractions. To decide which notifications to turn on or off, take a tip from non-profit group Center for Humane Technology. They suggest enabling notifications from actual people (such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp) while disabling the ones from machines (such as YouTube or Pinterest).
To turn them off, visit Settings > Notifications and uncheck which ones distract you the most often.
Create tech-free spaces
Carve out some quiet in your life. Think about charging your smartphone in your lounge and having phone-free dinners.
Parents with tech-addled kids may be interested in Ransomly, a Bluetooth beacon that smothers the connective capabilities of any device within its range. Perfect for a dinner table, study or bedroom, Ransomly creates a quiet space to step inside and focus on the present, or on those around you.
Disable video auto-play
Perhaps the sneakiest attention thief of all is the auto-playing video. This creates a carousel of never-ending content that’s designed to keep you watching. It’s the default setting on YouTube, Netflix, Facebook and Instagram.
To crawl out of the YouTube rabbit-hole, tweak the blue autoplay slide switch that sits at the top of the right-hand column of ‘Up Next’ videos. Similarly, to avoid binge-watching Netflix, visit Account > Playback Settings and disable the option ‘Play next episode automatically’.
For Facebook desktop, click on the downward arrow in the upper-right corner of the screen. From there, go to Settings > Videos, and on the drop-down menu next to ‘Autoplay Videos’ select ‘Off’. For the Facebook app, visit Settings > Account Settings > Videos and Photos, and uncheck Autoplay.
