Francisco Tolmasky

Think about everything you pay attention to while driving. Your main task is keeping your eyes on the road, but they also quickly jump to rear-view & side-view mirrors periodically, and to your dashboard to see your speed & fuel level. It’s actually quite amazing and subconscious

Now consider if instead there was a button that when pressed replaced your entire windshield with a back-facing camera feed or your current speed. That way you wouldn’t have all these “distractions” while driving. Do you think you’d be a better driver, or worse driver?

Although a bit contrived, this is similar to the trade-off we make going from a multi-window paradigm to a fullscreen one. Your eyes have evolved an amazing ability to pay a different kind of attention to the periphery than to what’s right in front you, and we’re wasting that.

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.