Instant Notifications Fragment Our Attention - A Few Thoughts

Instant Notifications Fragment Our Attention - A Few Thoughts

Aniruddha Sarkar

23 December 2023

We are the half-notifications generation.

We saw both the notification-free world as well as the notification-driven world.

In the 1960s and 1970s, we completed our school and college educations without any mobile devices in our hands.

Even during the two initial decades of our professional services lives, i.e., during the 1980s and the 1990s, we mostly depended on the land phones only.

In India, during the 1980s, things started changing gradually. Inter-networking became a reality.

By the later part of the 1980s, we witnessed a proliferation of large-scale private and public data networks with computing nodes scattered all over the country.

We, the professionals in the Information Technology industry, were exposed to notifications from the early 1980s. Within our organization, CMC, the R&D team based in Hyderabad, developed a messaging software solution known as AUTOMAX that used to operate on a store-and-forward-based messaging protocol. We used this product for our intra-office messaging solution. Thus, we, the employees of CMC, were introduced to short messaging solutions right in the 1980s.

CMC had a few clients including the Press Trust of India (PTI), who also used this messaging solution.

Later, Indian Railways launched the Passenger Reservation System (PRS) in 1986 in New Delhi. CMC R&D team had built PRS.

As PRS was rolled out to the other three big cities KOLKATA, CHENNAI, and MUMBAI, Indian Railways integrated these servers with high-speed telecommunication links. They also integrated CMC's AUTOMAX solution for operating their remote passenger reservation counters from several satellite cities/ locations all over India. That was the late 1980s and early 1990s. From this point onward, railway passengers could book intercity round-trip PRS tickets from anywhere in India.

We can say today, from the late 1980s, the era of Near Real-time Distributed Computing in mass transportation did arrive in India.

Silently, short messaging services (SMS) became a part of the ordinary Indian's life. It transformed the way people planned their long-distance travel. That was 1988-1989.

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Back to the main story on instant notifications.

In India, mobile phones were launched in the mid-1990s.

It took another five to ten years for mobile technologies to be affordable to common people.

By the early 2000s, ordinary Indians started getting exposed to instant notifications on their hand-held devices while on the move.

Peculiar scenarios started surfacing. Say, it is 1 o'clock, lunchtime. I am walking down Camac Street in central Kolkata, for a special lunch at a veg joint near our office along with a few colleagues.

At 1:05 pm, a notification from a colleague at the office lands on my phone: Aniruddha, the boss is looking for you in the office urgently. Come sharp.

At 1:08 pm, another notification from one high-profile client arrives: Dear Aniruddha, our chairman is in town. Can you come prepared and present the solution you proposed last time? We want to discuss this in the presence of the chairman over a working lunch.

-At 1:10 pm, another notification from a childhood friend comes: Aniruddha, I am here at the Camac Street - A J C Bose Road junction. Can you come down for a while? We can have lunch together as discussed earlier.

Three instant notifications land up within five minutes.

So, I start the balancing act. I speak to my boss. I tell him, it will not be possible for me to join him right now due to such and such reasons. He agrees.

Then I call my friend and profusely apologize for completely forgetting my commitment. As usual, he forgives me. We plan to meet by the weekend and have lunch together.

I then rush to my client location with my laptop for a quick presentation to the top brasses of our customers.

Dear Reader, kindly analyze the above scenario.

If the arrival of notifications is in scores, then what do we do?

We end up making bad choices, doing wrong prioritizations, upsetting friends, and skipping important commitments.

Certain relationships are very delicate. We hurt those relationships.

Certain priorities are misplaced. We keep chasing those golden deers till they disappear.

Certain demands are very loud, noisy, imposing, and urgent. We keep attending those while the delicate and valuable requirements are ignored.

Over a period, that takes its toll on us.

We may gradually realize that:

• We have lost a few delicate things in life.
• We lost the capability to think deeply because of fragmented attention. Thus we ended up making many wrong decisions.
• We kept on serving the urgent needs with split attention and developed a false ego that we were good at managing multiple things simultaneously.

In today's world, with notifications overwhelming us, we badly need to take out some notification-free time each day by switching off our devices.

We need to restore our undivided attention to complex problem-solving.

Quick-fix solutions may not work in most of the difficult problems.

The big question is:

Can we take out some solid notification-free time every day to think deeply about any requirements including complex problem-solving?

I do recognize, it's unfair to deliver a straight Yes or No judgment.

Dear Reader, please share your thoughts.

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