How making yourself unavailable can be a smart play in business and in life.

Three years ago I turned off all notifications on my phone and haven’t looked back. I started first with my personal phone, but then realized the boundary needed to translate to my professional life.

Have you ever looked around a waiting room or stepped onto a train car and realized, every single person in sight is staring at their device? Even if you can’t think of an exact incidence, I guarantee you that you have been in this situation at least once (but more likely multiple times) in the last six months. While it may have never bothered me before, now that I have more understanding of this dependence, I find myself strengthening my tech boundaries.

It all started with a documentary, one which I hope many of you have heard of by now, The Social Dilemma. As Netflix describes, this documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations. While I am not qualified to get into all of the specifics covered in this insightful, and slightly frightening documentary, I’d like to share just a couple of the stats that stood out to me from The Social Dilemma:

• A 5,000 person study found that higher social media use correlated with self-reported declines in mental and physical health and life satisfaction. — American Journal of Epidemiology, 2017
• The # of countries with political disinformation campaigns on social media doubled in the past 2 years. — New York Times, 2019
• 64% of the people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because the algorithms steered them there. — Internal Facebook report, 2018

It should be no surprise to us that technology is an addiction—one that stems from a need to connect, but ironically leads to disconnection. Over the last two and half decades, we have watched the birth of this new addiction through the launch of mass produced smartphones, computers you can hold with one hand, and hundreds of highly addictive social platforms such as: MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Pinterest, TikTok and yes, even LinkedIn.

Tech has been advancing at such a rate that the laws and regulations have failed to keep up in comparison, leading to continuous unethical design. But let’s backup and ask ourselves: why are our phones so addicting? There’s a reason why like drugs and alcohol, those who on social media are called users rather than customers. The tech corporations have knowingly tapped into the vulnerabilities of the human psyche to ensure that our phones remain addictive.

While you may be sitting there reading this thinking, “Riccardo, we all know our phones are addicting,” I guarantee you don’t know the full extent—the experts of these algorithms (most who do not use or allow their own children to use social media) admit not knowing the full extent of what they’ve unleashed. If you take anything away from this article (besides turn off your phone notifications), remember the golden rule: if you’re not paying for a product, then you are the product.

It is in the best interest of companies that the familiar ding of a notification instinctively causes you to pick up your phone and spend minutes or hours of your day engaging in advertisements. Advertisers are the customer, our attention is the product. Your involuntary reactions of reaching for your phone, a result of years of gradual training unbeknownst to you, is the key to their monetization.

Notifications are killing your productivity.

Some of you have been working overtime for these advertisers instead of for yourself. Think of every minute spent staring at your phone as dollars made for tech companies and their advertisers. So, while you’re helping the success of capitalism, you are sabotaging your own success—and without getting too deep, your lifestyle. You are not alone in this, I was extremely guilty of allowing my notifications/phone to control my workflow and personal time.

Personally, I am in meetings about seven hours a day, give or take. I had notifications letting me know 15 minutes before a meeting started and at the time of the meeting starting. Not only did these notifications pop up in the corner of my computer screen, thanks to pairing they also appeared on my phone and came through as an email. I kid you not, for every meeting I was getting about six notifications. I may need help remembering my schedule, but not that many reminders—and it must have gone on like this for years before I snapped out of it. This is just one example of the countless, distracting notifications I was receiving on an hourly basis. You may not think it’s an issue, you may even find it helpful; however, I don’t believe it’s truly understood how difficult it is to regain your concentration every time your system is pulled out of a task and onto a new notification. From a productivity standpoint, notifications were killing me.

Post-documentary, the unproductive process I had upheld for nearly two decades (increasingly getting more intense as technology improved), had to go. It started with the most obvious actions: turning off notifications of random apps on my phone, setting a focus period where notifications would be muted, reducing the amount of reminders, and so on. Once you start noticing how inundated you are with information at all times of the day, it’s pretty easy to lean in—I turned off all notifications, including my emails. Can you imagine not being notified when you receive a work email? Is that even allowed? Yes, and in my experience, it is necessary for success.

Today, if I want to know if I received an email, I have to unlock my phone, open the app (which has no red reminders shouting at me) to know. I won’t see a notification on my lock screen and I won’t be involuntarily forced to pick up my phone with just the que of a familiar sound—it will be my choice when I check my emails. Why is this important? I am now only going into my email app when I am mentally prepared for the stimulation. Have you ever experienced being mid-meeting or conversation and receiving a notification? For the remainder of that conversation, did you find that your mind was wandering and wondering about what lies behind that notification? Do you experience anxiety about not being able to immediately respond or action whatever it may be?

Listen, I am not perfect and very much still addicted to my phone. I regularly find myself opening various apps “just to check” if there’s anything new—particularly my email and LinkedIn. But what I think turning off my notifications has done is significantly reduce the level of anxiety that those notifications create. I control when I interact with my phone and it is far less frequent interaction than what my phone would like me to have. This practice allows for deeper work sessions, better reactions, more organization and less wasted in between time.

Are professional boundaries possible?

Without completely aging myself, back in my dayyou proved your dedication to your company by appearance; staying at the office into the evening, or at least later than your boss. I personally used to go to the office every Saturday and Sunday, in part to prove my loyalty. Now, you may be working from home or leaving the office for the day, but there’s an unspoken pressure to provide your dedication to your company through responsiveness. Where once, a document circulated via courier and the expectation was to read it by the end of the week, now it is expected we read the email and respond by end of the day (if not hour). Today, because we experience that expectation within our own homes, the most intimate place, it can feel arguably more intrusive than going into work on a weekend. While we may have switched out in-person facetime for prompt timely responses, the expectation shows the same bad leadership and puts workers in the same unhealthy place. Leaders need to stop confusing responsiveness for substance. How and when someone works does not constitute the value of their work.

And I am not immune from feeling the pressures of this expectation or causing team members to feel this expectation. Hell,  I’ve even written an entire article about my feelings on professional ghosting, which sponsors timely responses. Even so, between Teams/Sack, email, Zoom, social media platforms and phone calls, there are too many channels. I personally do not expect responses to anything within an hour and if it’s really pressing, I will pick up the phone and call you.

It’s a leadership issue.

Professional boundaries need to start with leadership. If I am emailing on a weekend, my direct reports may feel pressured to respond before Monday morning. While it is my choice to work on weekends, I now try to utilize the scheduling feature to keep communication to my team within work hours. Previously, I have simply included a note stating that I don’t expect a response until their working hours, but if they see that email, I have already disturbed their personal time. They will already be thinking about the response or task that I just prompted. And for that reason, delayed delivery has now become standard 90 percent of the time. Regardless of what communication tool we use, I don’t expect a response from my team after 6pm until the following work day.

I recognize that juniors earlier in their career may not feel like they are in a position to set professional boundaries, but here’s my advice to this group. Speak to your direct manager and have a set protocol in place; set the boundaries together upfront. You may require a different set of boundaries for your direct manager and internal circle than you have from an external circle. I have witnessed a shift to more work-life balance over the last decade, but some are still living in the grind. Depending on the response you receive from setting these boundaries, you may determine you are not at the right company. With access to all the tools to micromanage employees down to the minute, leaders have to make the conscious choice to trust and allow for deep concentration. Both productivity and work-life balance starts with the boundaries I set, I try to be disciplined as this is truly a leadership issue.

Take an actual holiday.

I’ve been quite vocal about how fiercely I now protect my personal time during scheduled vacations. Everyone will have their own unique tactic of course, but I recognize that I personally do not have the discipline to “just look at one email” and therefore turn off my work devices completely. Before we dive into it, let’s get one thing clear: Everyone, junior to c-level, is entitled to completely turn off during vacation. Some people may not want to ever fully switch off and that’s your choice, but I encourage those people to still utilize delayed responses—especially during team-wide holidays. Not doing so is a bad leadership trait and a self-centered expectation. There can be exceptions of course, but 99 percent of the time, whatever it is, can wait. Leaders, by not allowing time for recharge, you’ll hurt your team’s productivity, creativity and possibly cause individuals on your team to burn outas I did.

AI and its impact on your tech addiction.

I feel compelled to write this article now, as the problem will only continue to deepen its roots. If you follow me on LinkedIn, it’s likely you know what an AI enthusiast I am; however, it is impossible to ignore the danger of AI implementation in social media. Most of us hear and refer to our social media algorithm without really thinking about what it means. AI is essentially profiling you to predict your actions and then using those predictions to manipulate how you react. To put it simply, we are more profitable staring at a screen than living our life offline, so tech giants will do everything they can to ensure we spend more time doing so. The race to keep people’s attention isn’t going away, AI is only getting smarter at keeping us on the screen, not only predicting our behaviour but changing how we behave.  Algorithms are better now at predicting our actions and manipulating the content we are exposed to strengthen the addiction than they were even a year  ago.

There seems to be two camps when it comes to the laws and regulations surrounding artificial intelligence: some tech experts have sirened the alarm to reign in the development of AI so that a handful of regulated companies can control its learning; the other believe in democratizing it, letting it loose so all can innovate. I personally find myself leaning towards the latter. I believe the advancement AI will offer is too big to constrain due the potential downside. I find the very concept of deep fakes frightening, but there will always be bad actors—regulating the innovations could be counterintuitive.

Beides, there is too much profit to be made and zero fiscal incentive for tech giants to stop profiting on your data. The amount of data these companies have access to is unprecedented, lack of human supervision and our reliance on the devices is only becoming stronger. We are more likely to choose convenience over privacy. For example, I rather have Waze track my every turn than turn off my location for the app and figure out the best route on my own accord.

So, with the tech industry taking very little moral responsibility, we need to take this problem into our own hands.  I am all for technology and AI as a tool, but if it is a tool, it will wait for you. If it’s demanding things from you, your device has its own goals and will use your psychology against you to meet them.

I challenge you to opt out of notifications this week.

I understand the irony of posting about this topic on social media and possibly pushing a notification or two directly to some of you by doing so. While I know that most of us will never delete our social media platforms, I hope this article inspires you to have more control of when you choose to opt-in to distraction. For the next week, I challenge you to mute all notifications on your devices, only opting back into notifications you deem absolutely necessary. For example, my mom and my wife’s notifications will always come through (you can easily add this expectation under the “Notification” settings on your iPhone). Some of you may need to add your child’s school, etc. to this list in order for this challenge to be realistic. After a week, let me know how many “phantom notifications” caused you to pick up your phone. I’d love to hear about your detoxing experience and how you believe it impacted your productivity and overall well being

I highly recommend starting with watching The Social Dilemma and if you’d like to dive in deeper, check out some of the following resources:

Our Brains Are No Match for Our Technology, Tristan Harris, New York Times

The Dark Psychology of Social Networks, Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic

Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business Review

The Truth About Algorithms, Cathy O’Neill, RSA

Want to Work for Google? You Already Do, Joe Toscano, TEDx Talks

Free Speech Is Not The Same As Free Reach, Renée DiResta, Wired