- A new study has found that each notification can distract you for around seven seconds
- The more personally relevant the notification is, the more distracting it is
- Phones have tools to help address this, such as focus modes and other settings
You probably don’t need a study to tell you that smartphone notifications can be distracting, but it seems they’re even more distracting than you might think.
According to a new report that will be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior (via CNET), every time you get a message notification on your phone, it interrupts your attention for around seven seconds. Given how many notifications you likely get in a day — with study participants for example receiving around 100 a day — that can really add up.
The study consisted of getting 180 university students to do a Stroop task — that being a test that involves colored words flashing on a screen. The words spell one color and appear in another, and the goal is to correctly identify the font color, ignoring what’s written.
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Researchers split participants into three groups — one which received generic social media notifications on the screen while carrying out the test, one which was told the notifications mirrored those on their phone, and one which had blurred notifications appearing with illegible text.
In all cases, it was found that each notification affected their attention for around seven seconds, but the effect was most pronounced among the group who believed the notifications mirrored those on their phone — showing that more personally relevant notifications are more distracting.
Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the study’s first author, told CNET that “we observed that both the volume of notifications and how often individuals check their smartphones were linked to greater disruption.”
“This pattern suggests that the fragmented nature of smartphone use, rather than simply total usage duration, may be a key factor in understanding how digital technologies influence attentional processes.”
So how to address this? One obvious answer is to limit the ability for notifications to reach you. On iPhone, this can be done through Focus modes, which let you customize which apps will send notifications when a specific mode (such as ‘work’ or ‘sleep’) is active.
Depending on your Android phone you may have similar tools there too, such as the Digital Wellbeing tools (which also includes focus modes) on Pixel phones, or a basic Do Not Disturb setting.
If there are some apps that you never want notifications from, you could also permanently disable notifications for specific apps, through that app’s section of your phone’s settings menu.
You may also want to look into how notifications are displayed, with many phones allowing you to choose how prominent they are or where they appear — these options are typically found in the notifications section of a phone’s settings menu.
You could also distance yourself from your phone, putting it in another room for example when you’re working, though if you’re wearing a smartwatch that won’t stop notifications appearing on your wrist, and while the study didn’t look at wearables, we’d imagine the impact is similar.
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