Hotline Ping

I should have started writing this week’s issue a lot earlier than I did, I really had every intention to! But I’ve been rewatching Regular Show, and time got the best of me. As I started my seventh episode last Wednesday, slumped in my couch, my phone buzzed with a notification from WeCroak.

WeCroak sends me five direct reminders of my mortality a day. It’s a weird notification to get, but it always makes me stop and reflect on what really matters. That day, instead of jumping straight back into my cartoons, I thought about what it would mean to spend my last few seconds on Earth plopped in front of my TV. Baxter would miss his hourly belly rub. I’d never get to cook pork belly with my new precision cooker. This very issue, which Daniel gently told me “could use some work,” wouldn’t go out. There’s too much at stake, the cartoons had to wait.

Even if WeCroak’s bleak frankness won't work for you—maybe thinking about death that frequently will cause you more anxiety than insight—you can still learn something from the way WeCroak treats notifications.

A lot of people have said that you should turn off most, if not all, of your notifications on your phone to bring some much needed order to your life. They have the right idea: your phone's constant beeping is distracting and probably making you anxious, so you should remove the root of the problem. Notifications aren't the issue, though, it's the way we've been using them.

If you think about notifications as a way for apps to grab your attention, it's inevitable that you'll feel overwhelmed—lots of apps are thirsty for your eyeballs. But if you start looking at notifications as a way to make you better at the things that are important to you, those little red dots can become gentle reminders that improve your day.

The first step towards making that shift is taking stock of all of all of your apps. Yes, all of them. If you have an iPhone, go to Settings > Notifications to see them all in a list. Then, organize them by how they make you feel when they appear. I use two broad categories to help me think through this: apps that overwhelm me with my responsibilities and apps that make me pay attention to things I care about.

Axe notifications on anything that makes you feel bad. I’m serious! For me, that’s that's emails, Slack pings, upcoming tasks and events, news alerts, and anything from social media. This doesn’t have to be permanent, you can always turn these notifications back on if you need them, but I’ve found that doing this doesn’t actually make me miss anything. I check emails and Slack intermittently on my computer as I’m working throughout the day. I look at social media whenever I decide I want to and get excited to see a list of mentions, replies, or DMs. I usually read the news while I’m at the gym and I generally don’t miss anything really important.

After cutting out those apps, think about how you can use the notifications that are left to help you do things you really care about. I get reminders from Todoist to check in on friends when they're having a rough time, from Productive to ensure I dedicate time to the goals I set for myself this year, and, obviously, WeCroak to remind me that my days are numbered. My favorite notifications, though, come from my journaling app, which reminds me to look at entries I wrote in previous years. Last week I got a notification pointing me to a pretty depressing entry I had written three years ago that day, during one of my lowest points. It was a nice reminder that I've come a long way. These are the pings that matter.

In the News

Bring Marie Kondo tidying to your Twitter feed with this simple tool

Gone are the days of #teamfollowback. If you absolutely must be on Twitter, it’s good to cut out anyone whose tweets just aren’t really doing it for you anymore. This article talks about Tokimeki Unfollow, which takes the grunt work out of re-calibrating your timeline by showing you the most recent tweets from each account you follow, one at a time, to see if they still bring joy to your day. If not, no hard feelings, you have the chance to send them a nice Thank You note before hitting that unfollow button.

My Life Online—Without All the Metrics

In a quest to find zen online, Arielle Pardes installed a bunch of plugins that removed things like the number of shares, likes, or responses your posts get on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Like most social-media detox plans, it didn’t totally pan out. Getting rid of your need for validation sounds great, and extensions that remove your ability to check how well your tweets or ‘grams are doing seem like a promising step in that direction. The problem is that we crave that recognition offline too, and there’s no plugin that’ll change the way your brain works. Still, it’s important to not put too much emphasis on metrics. A selfie can still be fire, even if it doesn’t get the likes you were looking for.

Something Nice

Libro.fm: I love a good book, but sometimes it's hard for me to sit down and focus on reading walls of text for a long period of time. I've found audiobooks are a great way to get around this, since I can sketch, clean my apartment, or cook while I'm sinking into my latest page-turner. Audible is great, but Libro has the added benefit of supporting your favorite local bookstore. I chose Mostly Books, a store I used to frequent back in Tucson.

As always, if you have any questions, suggestions for future issues, feedback, or just want to say hello, drop me a line on Twitter.

My thanks to Daniel Varghese for editing this issue.