One of the main contributors to this is mobile notifications. Notifications feed on our urgency to act on something. But 99% of them are unimportant.
I understood this after being without a smartphone for 3 days around 2 years back. I then did a sweep of my notifications when I saw that I was getting 500+ notifications daily (which is a LOT!). However, there were a lot of notifications that I just dismissed without even reading the content. These needed to go.
I’ve now muted most of the group chats, turned off notifications from a lot of apps, and I’m down to <50 notifications a day. Try this out:
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Estimate the number of notifications you got on your phone yesterday.
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[Android] Open Settings, select Digital Wellbeing, and tap on notifications (will open a bar graph). See how many notifications you actually received yesterday.
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[iOS] Open Settings, select Screen Time, tap on See All Activity, and scroll down to see the number of notifications.
We did this in one of our meetups and the group numbers were off by ~10x! Try this out & DM me your estimated and actual numbers.