How to stay reachable without living in your notifications

On Hidden Brain ("You 2.0: Deep Work", 2019, a rerun of a 2017 conversation), host Shankar Vedantam put a fair objection to computer scientist Cal Newport. Shutting the door and ignoring your phone is fine for an author, he said, but someone still has to answer when there's an emergency. Newport's reply was that focus doesn't need a second tier of people on call. It needs a change in how people can reach you. One option he described is what's sometimes called the bat phone or emergency phone: a number people can use if something urgent comes up while you're working undistracted. Then he added what people report back:

People set these up and say they get called maybe once a year.

Cal Newport, Hidden Brain, 2019

Why "always on" feels necessary

Behind Newport's answer is a distinction: being reachable and being interrupted by everything aren't the same thing, even though a phone's default settings treat them as one. Most of what comes in can wait an hour. A few things can't. If there's no agreed way for those few to get through, every buzz has to be checked in case it's one of them.

Research shows the cost of simply switching everything off without that agreement. In a one-day challenge where 30 volunteers turned off notification alerts on all their devices, people felt less distracted and more productive. They also felt they could no longer be as responsive as others expected, which made some of them anxious (Pielot and Rello, 2017). In a week-long trial with 205 young adults, turning notifications off didn't reduce how often they checked their phones, and worry about missing something rose at first, then eased over the week (Dekker et al., 2024).

What works better than all or nothing

The studies point to a middle route that looks a lot like Newport's. In a two-week trial with 237 adults in India, people whose alerts were batched into three deliveries a day felt more attentive and more in control of their phones than those with alerts as usual; batching every hour made no difference (Fitz et al., 2019). And in the one-day challenge, about two thirds of participants planned to change how they handled notifications, such as keeping alerts only for messages from people or using Do Not Disturb at set times; two years later, more than half of those were still following their plans (Pielot and Rello, 2017).

Your phone already has the bat phone built in. On iPhone, a Focus lets you choose which people can still reach you (Apple Support), and Android's Do Not Disturb has similar exceptions.

How this fits the phone program

This is the exact problem the phone program works on for the pattern we call the On-call, where every alert feels urgent: you start by choosing who gets through. In the paid chapters you quiet your alerts on your own phone, add reply times if they fit your pattern, and, before you finish, test that your people still get through. That last step is Newport's once-a-year call, checked in advance. See how the program works; the first chapter is free.

Source: Hidden Brain, You 2.0: Deep Work, with Cal Newport, 27 August 2019 Research: Pielot and Rello (2017) · Dekker et al. (2024) · Fitz et al. (2019)