No More Blue Ticks - Why I Turned Off All Notifications

For a long time I expected that when I sent someone a message, I was owed a response almost immediately. This caused problems with friends, fights with my partner and frustration with business partners because they were, in my mind, all ignoring me.

Here’s how it went down in my mind: What absolute bullshit! How can it take anyone two hours to reply to a message from ME!? Surely they know I have things to do and their reply is imperative to the continuation of my day. Without this immediate response my day is ruined, don’t they know!? I just spoke to them like ten minutes ago, did they throw their phone over the wall and jump off a cliff? COME ON!

That is how my mind understood communication; I sent you a message, aren’t you lucky, you must respond immediately.

Earlier this year I was working in a high-pressure startup that required a lot of care and attention. The founding team - of which I was a part - was in close communication almost every hour on the hour throughout much of the day and a chunk of the evening. We operated in multiple timezones and even when we were altogether everything was urgent and it was understood that responses were immediate for any and all communication.

Then I left the company.

When my time at the company was over I decided to rethink how I use the communication tools at my disposal. I took a very detailed look at my anxiety levels, stress levels and my expectations of the people around me. I realised that real-time communication was destroying me, my relationships and my ability to do the work that I was most interested in.

Everything is real-time in 2020. News, communication, trauma, success, happiness, sadness, it’s all in real-time and streamed all over the world. You want to watch something else? Cool, pick from Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, etc etc. You don’t like what you’re reading? Cool, change it up and read something new on your kindle, phone, iPad, laptop. You want to see your friend a million miles away? No problem, Whatsapp video call, Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, Teams, check their Instagram story, Facebook story, TikTok uploads or anything else. You want it. You got it. No questions asked.

Even email is not perceived as asynchronous any longer. People expect you to receive, read and reply within minutes and if you don’t reply they send you a Whatsapp message and if you don’t reply to that they straight up, old school dial your number and phone you to tell you about the Whatsapp message they sent you about the email they sent you.

There is no escaping it, people expect you to reply to everything immediately.

But before I go on, let’s try to understand what happens to your brain when you receive an email or message.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” admitted Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, to an audience of Stanford students. He was responding to a question about his involvement in exploiting consumer behavior. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he explained. 

The above quote is pulled from a Harvard article titled Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time.

The article goes on to explain how dopamine engages with our social interactions and causes us to crave “successful” social interactions.

Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them.

We are being “rewarded” for what the world is telling us are beneficial behaviours. Every time you get a “ping” a “ding” a “buzz” or a flash of light about a new message or email you are being rewarded with a dopamine hit that reconfirms you are doing well socially. Social networks and social proof have led us to believe that posting, reading, messaging and engaging on social networks is a “beneficial behaviour”. Work environments have conditioned us to believe that doing email is a core function of our job and work. It’s often how we’re measured subconsciously by our peers and colleagues.

We’ve been tricked by Facebook (which owns Whatsapp and Instagram), LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat and all the others. Even the person who designed the exploitation at Facebook admits that we’ve been tricked. You now even get a little red mark on you browser tab that tries to pull you back into these services if there’s an unread notification. It’s brutal.

So I leave the high-intensity of a startup and decide to try and get to grips with my anxiety and stress caused by communication.

The first thing I did was turn off the blue-tick-read-receipt insanity of Whatsapp. Now I can’t see if people have read my messages and they can’t see if I’ve read theirs.

The second thing I did was activate a permanent out of office response telling people that I don’t do email as my work so they shouldn’t expect immediate replies from me.

The final thing that I did was refocus my work away from communication and towards my actual work.

Initially, I was fidgety and irate, constantly in anticipation of someone reading my message and responding. But then the craziest thing happened after a couple of weeks… I stopped caring about return communication. I stopped expecting people to message me back immediately and that meant I was never disappointed when they took two days to reply.

This is a key revelation. With blue-ticks on, I was constantly disappointed by people who did not reply to me as quickly as I reply to them. That rage and disappointment completely disappeared when I realised that they probably also have a job, emails, work to do, meetings, kids, husbands, wives, parents, stress, anxiety and that I was, SHOCKINGLY, not at the top of their priority list.

Expectation is the thief of patience.

I expect you to reply immediately so I have no patience relating to your day, your life and no respect for your time.

Recently I was contacted on Facebook by someone I used to know and last saw about 20 years ago. He was a kid (11 or 12) when I knew his brother and he had just seen me on a TV interview. He expected a reply and when he didn’t get one he lashed out at me and got very angry. He even sent me the “contact information” of very famous people that he allegedly knew to show me how important he is. Can you imagine being so demanding of someone else’s time that you become aggressive, name call and insult someone over chat when they don’t reply?

I blocked him and moved on with my day but the interaction really shocked me.

Have we become so desperate for social proof from others that if they are busy or just don’t want to talk to you we lash out? I think we have and I don’t like being desperate.

The incredible outcome of turning off read receipts and notifications for all communication is that I do not check my phone obsessively in case someone has messaged me.

My self worth is not directly tied to other people engaging with me in real-time. I have more time to focus on my work and my time is more focused because I’m not constantly distracted.

If you feel frazzled, harassed and are tired of people disappointing you because they dared to respond to you a few hours or a few days later than you expected, perhaps it’s time for you to reassess your self worth and the work you do.

Email is not your job. Email was never your job. Messaging is not a right, it’s a privilege.

You do not own other people’s time or their list of priorities. You have a gift called communication, use it to empower your day not destroy it. Take back control by not replying to every message and email as if it’s all urgent. It’s not.

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Communication Is Finally Front and Center for Leaders

Open and transparent communication. Easy to write down, easy to talk about but extremely difficult to actually do. Great communication (internal and external) is something that most business claim to have, many wish they had and deep down, most want to have. For whatever reason, however, communication is very rarely a skill that businesses work on consistently and set out to improve. It’s only when communication is horrific that someone will think to step in and attempt to improve.

Communication comes easily to some people while others struggle to verbalise their frustrations or compliments. Leaders don’t realise that their ability to communicate effectively can make or break a business. Whether you are engaging with your team as a whole and telling a clear story to motivate them or talking one on one with a specific person, the way you communicate matters.

One of the surprising upsides of this global pandemic has been a rush to communicate.

I am watching people who hate video chat dive into Zoom calls. I’m seeing people who are shy of social media reach out and post how they feel without a second thought. This new global enemy is giving us the permission to finally communicate effectively and I hope it’s a trend that becomes the norm.

How a leader communicates in times of strife is a clear indication of their ability to lead and their chosen priorities. Leaders who are prone to micromanaging will double down and make their teams insane. Leaders who are clear, empathetic and concise will thrive and really take centre stage.

Right now I believe it’s extremely important for over-communication to become the norm. If you used to check in with your teams once a week then it’s time to start checking in three times a week. Your quarterly financial reviews need to become weekly financial reviews and your annual supplier call best become more frequent or those relationships will start to break down very quickly. Over-communication does not mean micro-manage, there’s a difference so let’s dive into some ways that you can and should be communicating better with your everyone involved in your business.

Talk to Your Team

The Radical Candor motto.

For years I have been practising something called Radical Candor with my teams. The premise is simple; challenge directly but care personally. In other words, address the issue and not the person. You don’t have to call John dumb. He’s not dumb, he just did something silly. Address the thing he did and care about John and his ability to improve.

The key to great communication with your team is that it’s a two-way street. Your team is filled with the people you should trust to build your business and make your vision a reality. They are the ones who speak with your customers, build your products and sell them with all their might. If you have hired the right people then you should be able to practice Radical Candor with ease.

As a leader, you also need to be able to take on criticism and listen to feedback without taking offence.

Now that everyone is forced to work remotely, open and clear communication is even more important and if you don’t know how to take on criticism and you don’t believe that the people you work with want the best for you then you’ve lost the war before stepping into battle.

Tools like Slack, Skype and others are great but they are just the tools. It’s how you use them that is key. If you are asking your remote team to check-in, check out, alert you when they’re taking a toilet break or when they are going to have lunch then you are not trusting them to be the best version of themselves. You’re just remotely babysitting them and micro-managing them.

It’s imperative to have clear goals for the day, week and month that everyone is on board with and understands. Then you must be measuring your team’s performance, not their attendance. It’s impossible to measure their attendance remotely so err on the side of trust.

If you can’t trust your team then you have the wrong team or, alternatively, your team doesn’t trust you and you are the wrong leader for your team.

Another useful tool to set up appropriate communication is to create a “How You Work With Me” document. I always have my “How you work with Nic” document at the ready to share with new team members. This document helps my team understand my expectations around comms and gives them the opportunity to shine. I also always ask them to put their own version of the document together so I know how I should be working with them as efficiently as possible.

Talk to Your Suppliers / Creditors

Your knee-jerk reaction right now might be to go silent on your suppliers and creditors. That’s the wrong move. We are all going through this crisis together and your suppliers are scrambling to survive just as you are. If you engage with them directly it’s more likely that they will be on your side and try to work things out with you rather than against you.

This implies that you have a good pre-existing relationship with your suppliers and/or creditors.

Everyone wants to make it out of this insanity with their businesses intact. That is an unlikely outcome if you shut yourself off to the help that could be out there.

Often our reaction to a crisis is to hide and hunker down in silence trying to shy away from responsibilities until the very last minute, that’s not going to work this time. When the lockdown ends and you haven’t paid your suppliers they’re either going to hold this against you when business opens up or they will have gone under and you’ll have no one to do business with.

Get on the phone, set up a video call or just drop them a message but communicate more often than less often until we all know what the next move may be.

Talk to Your Customers

If you have built a relationship with your customers then they are expecting to hear from. I’ll say it again: We’re all in this together, on a global scale. Consumers, suppliers, brands, businesses, freelancers, the government, NGOs, NPOs, all of us are in this crazy pandemic together. Your customers want to know if you’ll be around when they get out of their homes.

You may not know if you’ll be around and that’s OK. Tell them that. Reach out to them one by one if you have to and ask them for ideas, see how they’re doing and just be present.

I visit the same restaurant around the corner from my flat at least once a week. I love that place and I’ll be very sad if it doesn’t survive this mess but I have no way to reach out to them, they’re famous for not playing by traditional rules of customer engagement and that’s why I love their brand but that is making it difficult for me to support them right now.

I want to hear from the brands and businesses that I love and trust. I want to support you and I want you to make it out OK in the end.

Send me an email, give me a phone call if you have my number, I’m OK with that in these extraordinary times. Give me the ability to opt-out if I want to but for the time being, hit me up. Again, over-communicate don’t ignore that this experience is happening to us all.

Let’s recap:

• Talk to your team

  • Trust the people you work with

  • Communicate with the people you trust

  • Practice Radical Candor (Challenge directly and care personally)

  • Set clear goals for the day/week/month

  • Measure people by their performance not their attendance.

  • Over-communicate rather than under-communicate

• Talk to your suppliers/creditors

  • Do not hide from your responsibilities, they aren’t going away

  • Try to find a fair solution for everyone

  • We’re all suffering together so let’s all engage and find a middle ground

  • Over-communicate rather than under-communicate

• Talk to your customers

  • If you’ve been good to your customers over the years, they’ll want to be good to you

  • Don’t beg but tell your customers how they can support you

  • There is a person behind the brand/business, be that person and talk to your customer

  • Over-communicate rather than under-communicate

If you have other tips for great communication in this new world, add them in the comments on this post!

Do you feel alienated by the Internet?

I don't. I feel connected, empowered and engaged.A common misconception for people who don't use the Internet as a matter of course is that it is alienating. I know people in my life who don't use or know what Google is. These people must surely feel as if the Internet will alienate them if they make us of it "too much".I feel the opposite these days. After three long years of full integration with Internet and its tools as a resource and part of my life I am happy to report that I feel alive when I use "cyberspace".What kind of a word is that anyways? Cyberspace? Who coined that term?This is what Wikipedia has to say:

Origins of the termThe word "cyberspace" (from cybernetics and space) was coined by science fiction novelist and seminal cyberpunk author William Gibson in his 1982 story "Burning Chrome" and popularized by his 1984 novel Neuromancer.[1] The portion of Neuromancer cited in this respect is usually the following: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding, (69).Gibson later commented on the origin of the term in the 1996 documentary No Maps for These Territories: All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

"A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions" - that is definitely not the Internet that I make use of. I am involved in a real world that assumes the parameters of what is socially accepted as the "real world". In fact, I find it hard to differentiate between waking up, driving to work, sitting at my desk and writing a story and waking up, switching on my Mac and writing a blog post. There is inherently no difference and thus I do not feel isolated.Sure I do both of the above, work at a desk and blog, but the two are both a part of my real existence.The Internet is not filled with fake relationships and sexual predators posing as young men to get in to bed with a young girl. Yes, there are those cases, but that is not what the Internet is anymore. The Internet is more, is everything and nothing to some.As you can see, I don't feel isolated or alienated but thrilled and revived by the Internet. Do you feel alienated?