I genuinely envy people who aren’t driven mad by blinking icons. A colleague shared their screen the other day, and their inbox showed five thousand — FIVE THOUSAND — unread emails. Another app had 126 notifications glowing like a submarine’s warning light. How do people live like this, Jeez?
The holiday salads are gone, and with the New Year comes the urge to adopt some new habit — if only so I won’t feel guilty about abandoning it later.
With the GTD book by David Allen or Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, anything distracting or irritating gets removed, or at least swept under the rug, where I don’t have to look at it.
My phone notifications are off for almost everything. No blinking, no flashing, no tiny red circles silently judging me. Let’s just assume I’ve manually disabled them everywhere humanly possible.
Phone calls stopped being part of anyone’s personal space ages ago; now they’re mostly spam and scammers. So I block all calls from unknown numbers. Occasionally — very occasionally — I miss something important, because in Germany official agencies really do call you. Sometimes I turn the filter off again, but honestly, I rarely lose anything of value.
Email is a whole separate comedy. In both my personal and work inboxes, everything is automatically marked as read. Messages sit there until I actually deal with them: read, delete, unsubscribe, or act on whatever the email wants from me. I check them when I have a spare minute and remember that email exists. Strangely enough, that’s still often enough.
The oddest moments are when someone pings me in a messenger just to announce, “Hey, there’s an important email, why didn’t you reply in ten minutes?” Let’s continue calling that behavior weird — and agree that if it’s urgent, they can ping me or us in chat from the start.
All group chats, communities, and channels in WhatsApp/Telegram are muted. Same in Slack. Same in Discord. We work in Teams, so that one stays unmuted — but only because our team is tiny. Context is everything.
I even track my app usage, so I don’t get sucked into random time‑sink holes. I look at the stats, nod wisely, and then continue getting sucked in anyway. Let’s file this under “potential improvements for 2026.”
What other sacrifice should we make to the gods of efficiency?
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I’m Alex, tech lead in Prestatech with experience from startups to middle-sized and big-tech companies. Loves to make effective and friendly team processes. The registry of talks and articles I gave is on the Published page.
You can freely drop a message to [email protected] or linkedin.com/in/aptakhin to greet and ask questions about any topic.