All throughout the day, our phones buzz, notifications pop up, and people give us their two cents.
Modern workplaces have been brought to a point where emails must be responded to within an hour and slack/instant messages should be responded to immediately. When the notification bubble appears, we just have to respond right away!
It fills our days with lots of emails and messaging "work" hours. We feel “productive” but the work we did was low-level easy work. Messaging and passing information along is work a robot can do most of the time. It’s not the way to generate real value in your work and develop skills in our rapidly changing work environments.
Imagine that you have a big, beautiful block of seven hours to complete your most valuable tasks. But every twenty minutes a notification appears and breaks your focus. You address the email or instant message for a couple of minutes and then you try to get focused again. You lose twenty minutes of every hour, at least, just trying to get back to the focused state you were in before that notification.
What is the longer-term effect of that on your work? How many special things could you have done but you never did because you were never able to sit still and work on the important, but difficult work–the stuff that will give you the most satisfaction and also be the best for your business long term.
To be constantly connected feels good and is the “easy way out” in terms of helping us to feel productive when we have delivered little to no actual value that propels our company forward. Disconnection allows us to shut out the world and deeply focus on the difficult, the rewarding, and the valuable work.