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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Mostly workong in the important but not urgent. Ill let the er staff know that. Lol
Joking aside i do get it most of the time things sould not get to the urgent and important box.
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The whole point of triaging incoming demands and doing all you can to subtly train the people upstream who are already informed of the importance and urgency of something to only get it to you in a way that interrupts your work if those things are indeed urgent, is exactly to create and maintain the space that lets you address most things in the Non-Urgent Important quadrant before they transit into the Urgent Important one.
If you don't have "thinking things through" and "maintenance/tweaking" time you're going to get a lot more fires and a lot more of the fires which start small grow into full-blown fires before you spot them, all of which just turns into a feedback cycle were all that urgent firefighting means you don't have time for preparation, prevention and detection, which in turn creates more fires and more small fires growing hence you have to spend more time in urgent firefighting.
To be honest, in my entire career I have never managed to, in a specific job, pull out from a "constant urgent firefighting mode" to a "mostly steady mode of work with an urgent fire having to be fought once in a while": making it happen has always been a case of me starting a new job and bringing in best practices from the start, so that by the time I'm finished with learning the environment, and integrating with a new team, and am working full speed, I'm keeping things under control. Doing it from the start of a new job is often possible because in my area (Software Engineering) people aren't expected to hit the ground running at full speed (since you have to learn the installed codebase and integrate with the team) so there's a lot of leway when starting a new job which you can use to set expectations from the start and to justify the extra time it takes to actually get a decent work process in place.
As I've written somewhere else, I've actually managed to bring over and use the Dutch style of working in a British Finance environment (which is hectic and prone to shoot-from-the-hip management and firefighting) to yield better results (faster and more predicable deliveries, were the work I made was better matched to use needs and had fewer bugs) than most of my colleagues and did all this working 8h/day rather than the 10h+/day they did.
IMHO, the process works, and I believe that's the merit of the process rather than being a "me" thing.
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I disable notifications for most of my apps anyway, but the neural connections are still there and hard to undo. Breaking them is a long process in my experience... or maybe I reinforce them too much still.
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Thanks for bringing up the quadrants. I've been aware of them but feel like I haven't been using them optimally to figure out how to best focus my time and energy. Somehow I didn't realize important/non-urgent was the primary one to focus on...
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Well, as /u/[email protected] pointed out, people tend to be forced to, at the very least, work in the Urgent and Important quadrant because that's what one has to give top priority to, no matter what (and part of the work of triaging the demands on one's time is to make sure one doesn't miss or delay things from that quadrant because of too many Non Important stuff interrupting one's work).
However you want to try and get yourself in a situation were Non-Urgent Important stuff is what you do most, because amongst other things by tacking potential problems in Important domains before they become Urgent, you have a lot more space to do it properly, something which in turn avoids further problems due to one's half-arsed solutions for Urgent not working anymore of breaking easilly when touched.
In summary, Non-Urgent Important is the ideal, Urgent Important is what gets top priority, Non-Important is what you do when there's nothing in the other 2 quadrants to do.
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7 Habits?
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No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.
Let's just say she was a lousy manager.
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Seems a lot of comments are arguing about this as if it's an all-or-nothing. I use a dumbphone (for many reasons), but even it allows me to configure DND settings to allow certain phone numbers to audibly ring through. Surely smartphones can do the same? I find being with someone whose phone is constantly making noises to be very irritating--and more so if they interrupt our conversation to check it every time.
My not-so-dumb flip phone also has 3 indicator lights on the closed cover -- red if battery is low, a green envelope if I have a message or other notification, and a blue phone if I've had a call (even those can be disabled). So I don't have to touch it or do anything other than glance in its direction to know I have a message. "Smart" phones can do such simple things as this, can't they?
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That is pretty much how I feel - like I'm putting out the fires every day, but not actually progressing on what I want or plan to do. It's a tough balancing act that I'm still trying to figure out... time management is a tough skill to learn when it doesn't come easily or naturally.
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Yeah, that stuff it's pretty hard to learn and it's worse when you've never worked in an environment where people in general tend to practice good time management - a lot of thing you would normally not risk doing because they look like time wasting turn out to be the key to saving time and problems (which in turn, are also time when you're the one that has to fix them) later, but only after you've seen it in action can you know for sure that such things will in overall save you time (and can actually justify doing them to others because you've seen them actually work).
I was luck that after 2 years working, having chosen to leave my country I ended up in The Netherlands, and the Dutch are very good at working in an efficient and organized way that properly respects work-life balance, so I learned a lot from them and watching and learning how they worked and the results of it, gave me a whole new perspective into the work practices from my first job which until then I though were "the way everybody works in this area".
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Envious, that sounds like a great experience. Trial by doing is probably the best way for most people to learn. I'm very verbal, but even for me, reading things doesn't necessarily make it stick any easier.
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I have my phone set to DND at all times, and I can confirm that you can allow certain notifications to come through. Only important notifications and calls from contacts come in. My peace of mind improved quite a bit with this change.
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That's good. Some of the comments were making me wonder!
I think some people may not realize how detrimental it can be to their quality of life or stress level, to have something constantly interrupting their attention or that it's something that can be controlled without having to completely cut themselves off.
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Bro ya need to use your neuralizer
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Tbh suddenly changing skin color is nothing normal for humans
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Yeah, they solved that over a decade ago. Both iOS and Android let you override DnD for contacts and or repeat callers.
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Late to the party, then. Most people I know disabled them a decade ago and didnt look back.
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I mean, you can set DND to be on at certain times so that, short of an emergency that is sent tagged as such, you won't get notifications during certain hours of the day or night. Y'all don't need to get all bohemian self righteous with the whole "I've disconnected from the world through my phone and have never looked back". Seriously, get over yourself. We all have our crosses to bare and DND is a great feature for some "leave me alone" time but there's no need to become a virtual hermit in order to have some peace and quiet.
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Been on silent for over a decade too, but in an outlier and friends phones are so damn annoying.
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Removing Google Play Services did the trick for me. No more marketing notifications, just bliss and essential notifs from foss apps that don't use Google. No more compromise with these fucking corps.
