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Reconditioning Required
How to rethink your response to technology creep
Are you one of Pavlov’s dogs?
In an average day, about 10 different sounds might come from my phone. There are different ringtones for different people, and message alerts from multiple platforms. Considering that I have most notifications and alerts switched off, 10 feels like a lot yet it doesn’t take long to add up.
Just as the dogs were conditioned to the sound of that bell in Pavlov’s experiments, I have become conditioned to respond to the different sounds on my phone.
Ping-ping! Oh, that’s a message from my son.
Click-ick! Ah, that’s a Slack message.
And, so on.
My reaction will depend on which of these sounds I hear. Will I rush to pick up my phone and check on the message, or will I leave it and finish what I’m doing?
The discipline to a) turn off most notifications b) ignore some of them on purpose and c) switch my phone to silent mode when I want to focus has taken a lot of time to develop.
First up was the awareness that I was responding to the demands of my phone in that Pavlovian way. Then came a conscious decision not to continue to do so. And, finally, I needed to adopt a new set of rules by which I was…
