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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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.
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the more specialized the workforce, the harder it is to overcome staffing limitations. for example, in Italy, there's a huge physician shortage (at least when I lived in Europe there was). You won't fix that with simply changing the management culture.
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Mine is currently the intro to Give Me the Night by George Benson, in case anyone wondered.
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As a Dr’s kid nothing you have said sounds unusual for your job. My dad didnt like getting calls asking for free care but he was more than happy to run to the neighbors house when my buddy, aged 5, called at 3am and said “The baby is blue!”. That baby is 45 years old now and not blue.
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This is interesting because I very deliberately try the opposite. My top priority is always making time for helping colleagues. Most of my industry is super green and the young staff require a lot of training/attention if you want them to develop well/quickly. It means when I first started my team things were a bit hectic, but years later it basically runs itself. I always prioritize investing in individuals so that when things pile up I've got 20 people I can delegate to. What's more, this is cultural at this point so they all do the same. It's basically a positive feedback loop at this point where things just sort of work cause everyone knows what they're doing.
There is another team next to mine that is run a lot like how you're describing and they are constantly missing schedules/going over budget/having quality issues cause the lead 'doesnt have time right now'. Except right now is all the time and none of the staff seem to know what they're doing and are all super frustrated.
Anyway, all that to say I think how you structure these kinds of things depends a lot on what kind of work you do, what kind of team environment you have, and what your overall goals are. Could I be individually more productive if I told everyone else to go away? Absolutely yes, I'd get 3 times as much done, but the team overall would be less efficient.
I also don't work outside work hours, and neither does anyone else on my team because we're efficient enough at work to plan out and execute 40 hours of work per person per week. The same can't be said for that other team where the lead goes home and everyone else is left confused working crazy OT.
Your way seems to work for you, but I think it is important to note that there is no 'right' approach for all situations. One needs to define the objectives and then determine what the best approach for accomplishing those might be for that particular role. In short, it's complicated. And anyone who says it's not is generally trying to sell something
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I did that when I started (I am, modesty on the side, a natural at what I do for work) and the result was that I became the top problem-solver of my team and over time I had more and more load from people bringing me their problems whilst still being expected to do the formally allocated work, with the end result that when I left that job I was working very long hours, always tired and my productivity had plummeted.
What was happenning there was that, because of me always saying "yes, I'll help you" with zero pushback, I became the easiest path for people in my team to quickly solve their problems, and that was including problems they could solve themselves. Also my effectiveness at doing anything fell massivelly because whatever I was doing, in the middle of it I would be interrupted (which has quite the cognitive cost due to interruption of the mental state of Flow and "mental context switching") and if I immediatelly went into solving that new problem I would likely be interrupted at that too (leading to multiple things hanging half-way to done and making my delivery speed overall worse), and even if I wasn't interrupted serving the latest interruption the mere "stop this task, do something else equally complex, then get back to the original task" increased the probability of mistakes in the original task because of the possibility of losing track of important details of the work I was doing in it.
Human beings are naturally lazy (myself included) and if, because you offer no pushback, coming to you with any problem is easier and faster than trying to figure it out themselves, people will tend come to you with their problems before properly after little or no effort to solve it themselves, which might be doable (though not good for them or for you) if it's only one or two people, but not when it's more than that.
If only to avoid becoming the minimum-effort-path for everybody else and/or having your efficiency drop because of not enough single-task focus and too much context switching (and the entire team's efficiency fall compared to them solving all the problem they can solve themselves), you have to do some pushing back.
You aren't hired to do the work of others and neither are you hired to underperform because you're in constant firefighting mode even for things which are unimportant or not really burning, so immediate response to any demand on your time from somebody else is pretty much the most amateurish, least professional way to do your work for anybody which is not a junior-level professional.
That said, if you're lucky enough to be in a situation were you empowering others to work better is recognized and desired or, even better, you're expected to and have officially time to be a mentor, then you can relax the pushing back: you still should triage the urgency of your response to things to match their actual urgency - that's just basic competence at organising your time and work - but you can now when approached by somebody with a problem dedicate some time to teach people to help themselves (literally have them sit down and explain how to diagnose and fix it whilst they do it themselves) both so that they don't constantly come you with simple problems (which isn't really the value added stuff you're being paid a Senior level professional cost to do) and for them to grow as professionals, and if you're mentoring you'll want to go further and periodically sit with the junior types and do overviews of things or help them out in planning how to tackle a complex thing they're about to start.
Still, in all this, you have to plan your time and triage access to you time based on urgency and importance in order to mantain good performance and actually deliver results in a predictable way, So as to best fits the needs of your employer: for any employee beyond junior level, good time management (which includes the priority of your response to queries and problems match the importance and real urgence of them) is just simple professional competence and since the triaging itself is a time cost (quite a big one if it breaks you out of Flow and forces a mental context switch), you want it done in the most effective way as possible and by the more well informed about the important and urgency of the situation as possible, which means most of it should be done upstream and before getting to you.
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From what I've observed when living in the UK and now that I'm living in Portugal, it's shit management practices all the way up, with the politicians at the top being the worst managers of the lot.
But yeah, I can empathise with being in an work place were no matter what you do to try and manage your time to deliver your best (as the years went by in my career, I've learned various professional occupations which are are part of the "feed-in" for the main work I do, to quite an advanced level, merely as a means to improve my performance at delivering the right results at the right time, which is taking efficiency improving to quiet an extreme level), it just feels that all levels all the way up are working against you and that you're just rowing against the current all the time.
Fortunatelly for me, I can just change employers and even countries if I think the overall work conditions are shit and I will never be able to properly manage my time, though I've noticed that plenty of medical professionals can't, plus in my experience, when you're snowed in by out of control inflows of work, you don't generally have the energy to even start planning your way out of it.
That said, having moved from The Netherlands (whose management and work culture is generally very good) and into Finance in the UK (which is a pretty hectic and ill organised "shoot from the hip" environment), it's perfectly possible to apply the techniques of highly organised and well managed environments in disorganised ones to produce superior results (in speed, quality and predictability of delivery timings) to those of everybody else there.
That said, I'm talking about Software Engineering here, which is a Logic+Creative area were you can "backup your patient" before you do something in case you make a mistake, unlike Medicine (though in Finance things can get "interesting" - read millions of dollars can be lost - if your code starts getting used by Traders and it's not working properly). On the other hand one would expect that in Medicine, being properly rested in order to reduce the risk of mistakes is even more important.
