Francisco Tolmasky

More importantly, whenever you switch apps, like to answer a text message, your brain is getting a huge signal that “this is the main task now” and in the process deprioritizes what you were doing beforehand. This is rarely what you want.

This is “intended behavior”: it draws the entirety of your focus to each minute task you engage in. But this is its exhausting and, ironically, distracting. I want to devote “periphery” brain power to periphery tasks. But there can be no periphery tasks in a fullscreen world.

In a multi-window world, even when I bring an app like Messages to the front, my important apps are still visible in the background, usually taking up most of the actual space on the screen, serving as a visual indicator that *that* is still what I’m actually working on.

For me this makes me want to finish the interruption quickly, as opposed to the interruption receiving its own bespoke zen garden to monopolize my attention. I find myself forgetting what I was doing far more frequently on mobile, I think partially because of this.

So interestingly, on desktop I can have my “distractions” always visible, yet less distracting, since checking them shifts to the subconscious “polling” part of my visual process, vs. the conscious one that must decide to react to a notification.

Arguably, notifications became crucial *because* the entire screen was monopolized. Whereas before you could pick and choose multiple windows that show you information, we now needed a specialized system dedicated to this. And of course they had to overlap your primary content.

Then we had to build additional configuration around this, like “do not disturb”, which is in my experience too coarse. I don’t want some global notification cancellation, I just care about different things at different times, and usually in the periphery.