The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back
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All my phones have always been on DnD, I don't even know how my ringtone sounds.
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I've had mine on vibrate for years. Texting doesn't trigger it, only calls. It's been great.
I look at my phone only when I'm ready to look at it. -
Headlines like this are annoying AF. You wouldn't want your doctor keeping their phone on DND 24/7.
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Hmm maybe I should try this
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Your doctor has a work phone that is available only during hours.
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I keep Do Not Disturb on most of the time and my wife can contact me at any time. Her and a few others are flagged as exceptions.
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I've been activelly managing my mobile phone pretty much like that since the 90s because after getting my first mobile phone I quickly figured out that if allowed to the thing just turned into a source of near-constant urgent non-essential alerts, in other words, unnecessary stress.
Decades ago, I learned about the whole 4 quadrants thing in management:
https://www.testprepchampions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4quadrantstimemanagement-1024x768.jpgYou're supposed to work mostly in the "Important Non-Urgent" quadrant as much as possible and mobile phones if not properly managed constantly pull you to the "Not Important, Not Urgent" which is the worst quadrant to be working in.
In this perspective the problem with mobile phones (and e-mail also to a great extent have a similar problem) is that all notifications/calls look equally important from the outside, so you have to stop doing what you're doing to check them because they might actually be stuff from the "Important and Urgent" quadrant, but unless you tightly manage it, most of them are not, not least because, if you push back on it hard the people who constantly work in the "Non-Important, Non-Urgent" quadrant (i.e. those who are bad at managing their own time) will make that your problem too.
So what do I do to manage it so that my phone is not a source of stress:
- Calls to my phone for work subjects outside work always (this is important) get a "I'll talk to you when I'm back at work". You have to inflexibly refuse to handle work stuff outside work otherwise the number of work calls will just creep up. Also do it from the very start of a new job: your work colleagues need to be trained to expect that from you and you need to provide them with an actual positive out (i.e. "I'll talk to you when I'm back at work" and actually do it). If an employer needs you to provided out of hours support, that has to be in the contract and there has to be a work phone just for that which will be ON during the hours contracted for that and OFF otherwise.
- Call to my phone for work subjects during work time get triaged and non-urgent or non-important stuff get's back a "I'm busy now, I'll talk to you about this when I have the time" if I indeed have something more important or urgent on the plate. Again, train your colleagues to expect that if they call you with non-urgent or non-important stuff there you will not be giving them that sweet feeling of having dumped the problem on somebody else - the objective here is not to "deny service", it's to as much as possible have other people do the triaging for you so that you're only interrupted by things which are worth it.
- E-mail is for non-urgent stuff: when I have the time I'll look into it. On my phone E-mail arrival notifications will be turned off. Again, work colleagues need to be trained by you to expect exactly that from you. Be organised yourself and have regular "check e-mail" times - this is part of getting other people do the triaging for you.
- All application notifications default to OFF. Very few ever get turned ON and if they abuse it they get turned OFF on the settings. The sending of a notification by an application is a choice of whomever is the maker of the app, hence follows their choices and generally serves their purposes, which means that most application notifications are in some way or another a marketing choice, either directly some kind of sales pitch or indirectly to "remind you of that app", which means they're most definitelly neither urgent nor important. Only a handfull of applications deserve to have notification enabled IMHO, and sometimes even some of those abuse that and stop deservings it.
TL;DR - Triage things so that you're as much as possible spend your time doing Important Non-Urgent things (You go after the non-urgent to reduce the number of things that through doing nothing about it whilst they're not urgent, go from potential problem into "Oh, shit everything is burning!"). Activelly segregate contact channels based on the triaged level of subjects. Train your colleagues from the start to expect just that (i.e. that e-mails don't promptly get responded) and always push back from the start against misuse of contact channels (i.e. non-urgent non-important stuff coming via phone gets a response along the lines of "I'm busy with more important stuff, so send me an e-mail about that and I'll look into it when I have the time"), so that essentially other people will be triaging that stuff for you before they even contact you. As for smartphone Apps, by default assume that notification sending is driven by Marketing considerations of the maker of that app and hence are neither important nor urgent (personally I default to notifications OFF for most apps).
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if they are doing outpatient work, they don't. even worse, the paging systems migrated to cell phones.
sauce: am doctor
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No you do not.
You don't want an incredibly tired person prescribing treatment for you or, worse, operating on you, unless you have some kind of death wish.
You want a proper call rota and the doctor "on call" to have their phone on and be available during their on-call hours.
That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn't: it's you and all other people who think like you (or if they start by not thinking like you, they'll change their minds when they see others who do think like that get prompt service whilst they themselves do they not).
That logic just leads to people who if they make a mistake can kill you or give you a problem for life (by prescribing your the wrong medicine or, worse, cutting the wrong thing whilst operating) being very tired and hence way more likely to make mistakes.
Having a single professional having to be on call 24/7 is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - fine if only one or two people used that availability only for very urgent problems, a disgrace for everybody when lots of people innevitably use that availability for any shitty shit little thing.
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That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you
Definitely not an "idea of mine". That's the US experience (I'm a doctor here). The US's most common electronic medical record system developed a secure messenger app that replaced pagers so yeah for outpatient work most of the time-critical messaging goes through your cell. So no, I can't be on DND 24/7. (I do have very aggressively tweaked work/personal/etc notification settings, but sometimes the urgent messages do need to come through after hours)
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Yeah same here, and I haven’t missed it a bit. As a downside, I constantly misplace the thing and have to search for it when I hear the specific rhythmic vibration somewhere. If anyone had something extremely urgent, they’ll be able to call my partner or neighbor or something. And I do check the notifications daily, too, so Im never completely out of the loop.
I’ve noticed, also, that I’m much better at actually answering the phone or answering messages. Former since I so seldomly get any noticeable feedback from the phone, so it feels fine to grab it and answer if it rings and I happen to notice it. The messages, because I read them when I have time, so then I also have time to answer. I used to get messages and read them and I’d be in middle of something, so I’d just think to myself “I’ll reply later”, and I very rarely remembered and actually did.
It feels counterintuitive, but I’m not complaining. Life is much more peaceful. I get all the busy notifications and contacts and news and all that on my own terms, when I’m ready, and it feels great not to be disturbed while I’m working or cooking or whatever.
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I use signal too, exclusively apart from sms or the rare iMessage my grandparents send. It’s been fine. I can’t recall if it was app setting or it just works(tm), but I get no sounds, and still get notifications so I can check them when I have the time and energy to deal with all that.
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How's the most expensive healthcare in the world supposed to be a convincing example?
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it's neither a US- nor a profession-specific issue. it's an issue of any high-stakes, relatively niche occupation.
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Not really any one, most sectors have office hours, schedules, on-call rotation etc.
It's unusual to saddle a single person with 24/7 required availability. Do you not have a single colleague you can rotate after hours calls with?
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You really should use a separate phone though. Even if it's just a virtual phone. Everyone deserves to have free time.
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I use an IP phone for calls that you can switch off. The paging system is a whole 'nother story.
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Headline reads: "i turned off ALL notifications forever".
My take: there exist people who can't do that.
Your take: US bad.
My take: not a US-specific issue.
Your take: please describe your call schedule in detail because your claim is unusual.
Thank you, but no thank you.
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Yeah I think your inability to turn off notifications is artificial. There's no reason that these emergency calls can't go to a landline in a staffed hospital instead of directly to one specific doctor.
If the organization requires this, that's different from it actually being impossible to do otherwise.
If your hospitals are businesses, you as their employee are subsidising them. They could spend the money on an additional, qualified doctor, but they won't.
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Well, I'm sorry for you guys to have to work under the worst of American management culture (the baseline of which, compared to Northern Europe and Scandinavia, is pretty bad).
Coming from a Southern Europe country and having worked in a couple of countries including Northern European ones, it's my experience that a lot of those abusive work practices you see in Anglo-Saxon and Southern European management cultures are neither needed nor efficient, and instead are just the product of bad organisation (read: incompetent management) and employees enduring it under the mistaken assumption that "that's just the way things are"/"there is no other option".
If there is one thing that going to Northern Europe and working there taught me is that those things are almost never needed and most definitelly are not universally the way things are.
