No need to be online all the time

Recently, a friend and coworker, Holger Krekel, is making a series of micro posts on Mastodon about screens, online time and online experience.

Even we only have little interactions, I feel Holger has some insightful ideas about using tech the healthy way.

What I am talking about here, is about culture and health. Smart devices, like smart phones and PCs should be used in the right way. Otherwise, they will hurt us. And the way most people use these devices, they are very harmful.

From some points of view, the people of the old like my Father have got an advantage to my generation. They don’t use technology much and they are away from both the benefits and the harms. My generation, however, use technology excessively. But the way they use it, often causes more harm than benefit.

One of things which are really harmful to my concentration are notifications. These days our computers produce them, our smart phones produce them. And some of us even buy smart watches to have notifications on their wrist, too.

I believe we don’t need to get notified about every single happening on social medias or in IMs. I believe notifications, both the pop up messages and the counter badges, are harmful for my concentration. That’s why I recommend getting rid of them while working. Here are a bunch of advises you might find useful:

• While working, set your phone to vibrate or even silence, and don’t receive notifications, big or small, going on your phone. An exception could be calls. I am usually fine receiving calls from family and friends. If I’m very busy, I reject and they know they should call me later. If they call rapidly, it’s probably something urgent.
• Don’t expose your phone number to any organization or in the public. This will lead spammers to you either calling or texting. The same could go for your Email address or social handles/IDs.
• Maybe opt for a feature phone. Note that a feature phone can be a dumbphone or a smart phone. A dumbphone by my definition has got only calling and texting features. It can’t connect to the Internet. But might be able to provide tethering for other devices. A smart feature phone has got a connection. But is limited. In past, you can opt for a KaiOS feature phone. Currently that’s only a thing if you are based in Africa or the US. You can read more why I chose a KaiOS phone over an Android phone in this blog post on BananaHackers blog. But as of 2025, I wouldn’t recommend KaiOS anymore.
• Disable any sort of notifications which aren’t urgent on your PC. It includes the counter badges, maybe the badges entirely and also the popup message. You have various methods depending on your PC configuration to opt out of receiving notifications for some time or at all. For instance on KDE Plasma, you can disable the notifications. Depending on your configuration you might also be able to disable them for like an hour.

All these advises are based on a single principle: You don’t need to be online all the time. You don’t need to receive notifications all the time. And don’t worry, if someone had a life or death situation, they will call you!

Also as a bonus for reaching end of the post, if the web was more local first, it could be really cool. You could disconnect, have some peace and concentration. Then again connect when you want to do a git push or comment on some PR.