Uh-oh.
No scheduling, no easy toggling, no time outs (like “don’t disturb for the next N minutes”), no allowlist for specific numbers to punch through, no “if they call twice let them through”.
The two options for “new activity icon” are a bigger problem. You see, the problem for us caught in the “check-check-check” mentality is that the activity icon is like a slot machine, crack-a-pack, treasure chest, gambling, choosing a scratch ticket over bread, dopamine injection! “Ooh do I have a li’l hug waiting for me if I unlock?”, that’s what the asterisk says. That damage would be minimized if the lock screen gave just a little bit mit more info about what’s going on instead of all activities (no matter how trivial or disappointing) showing the same li’l light-up Christmas star.
And turning off that alluring lootboxy li’l asterisk is a thousand times worse because then the entire phone becomes a constant, never-ending slot machine. I can’t know whether or not I have anything without going through that li’l addictive “unlocking” ritual. Unrapping the pack, flipping the ante, scratching the ticket, pulling the slot machine lever… and unlocking the phone. Those extra hoops ironically is what makes it more addictive.
Hark, y’all: once upon a time there was an unusually cruel animal experiment. One group of the li’l critters got unlimited amount of food. Anytime they wanted food, they could just go and get it. No risk of ever running out, just a constant cornucopia of li’l treats. The other group, they got a contraption that they could engage with that randomly, sometimes, if you’re lucky, it gave you food.
That first group with easy-access food? They thrived and lived healthy and cozy lives. Post-scarcity for the win. No anxiety about where the next hug’s gonna gome from once you know there is love.
That second group with the gambling contraption? They got hooked. Hooked with a capital every single letter: H O O K E D. They eanded up eating way more than the group that had infinity food. And they died and it was pretty awful.
Now, everyone’s different and that’s great but I know that I’m super susceptible to these li’l dopamine habits. That’s just my personality (and/or it’s a messed up prefrontal cortex causing executive dysfunction but uh, let’s go with the personality story instead, I like that better). I get into all these li’l mostly-unconscious habits and behaviors and obsessions.
Now, there’s a lot of talk about dark patterns and how the tech companies hire psychologists that are literally trying to make this stuff even more addictive. As insane as that rumor sounds and as broken a human needs to be to sign up for that task, I stills have every reason to believe it’s true. (Market capitalism has a couple of flaws, it turns out.)
But here’s the thing. Even without deliberately trying, these “dark patterns” arise. Because design is difficult. Endless scroll was designed because someone thought it was convenient and less of a chore. Likes and stars were invented because people were sick of the “I agree, well said!” posts that plagued Usenet in the Eternal September era. It wasn’t made to hook us and mess with us, but since, uh, mistakes were made, that’s what ended up happening.
Our best hope is to iterate, to notice these behaviors and try to fix them with better design. Designing for convenience has backfired and created addiction. But so has designing with deliberate hoops and obstacles.
Scheduling can be part of the solution. Like, growing up, we read the paper every morning. We were “addicted” to that habit but it was an addiction that couldn’t really grow. If we wanted more paper, we still had to wait until next morning.
We want less stress, right? Sometimes more design can lead to a simpler life.
Tempo, a proprietary (boo and hiss! Long live FOSS) email app that I never personally used but I saw videos, had some really good ideas there. You’d have an allowlist of friends and fam who got to reach you right away, and other email you got to see in scheduled batches, and the main screen was a todo list, not an inbox. Yeah, sometimes sites will be like “we’ll send you a verification code over email that’s valid for the next thirty seconds” or your boss will call asking for some sorta special turnaround, so Tempo did have a “let me please peek at my future email even though it’s not time for the schedule” feature, and it did have plenty of “are you sure? hold the button for so-and-so-many seconds” hoops in place really meant to safeguard you that could easily become an addictive scratch ticket, but the main safeguard was that since there was scheduling, you could tell yourself “Okay, I really really wanna peek but I’m gonna wait until the schedule comes around with one hundred million angels singing.” and that, in combination with the allowlist that gets let through right away, might at least alleviate that itch.
Tempo is an example of “more” design, since instead of just a simple “here is box, mail come here, Hulk smash”, it was more elaborate with different tabs, different categories of mail, but that setup would hopefully lead to a state of “less”, to fewer bad habits for you. “Hey”, another proprietary app (with additional baggage on top of that, apparently, but that’s a story I don’t wanna go dig out of /dev/null) similarly has a more elaborate workflow with stacks and separate inboxes and a multi-reply-view, that’s all ultimately meant to hae you spend less time in email, not more.
Two decades ago, Merlin did an [interview with David Allen][iwD] that I really loved.
| [iwD]: http://www.43folders.com/2006/11/28/productive-talk-comp “Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD’s David Allen | 43 Folders” |
It has many gems, but one thing I’ve been thinking about lately is when Merlin starts talking about some of this stuff like scheduling, batching etc to try to curb the checkmania, Allen pushes back a little, saying that for some occupations, the entire point of the job is to be on top of things costantly. Two of his examples are a “missile silo” and an OB/GYN as the two examples.
But Merlin and Allen quickly agree that if that’s not your job, it’s not your job. If your job is to actually think or actually do things (or actually not do things, as the case may be), having a couple of tiers of we get info can be a good thing. Not every message need to get to us right away.
But the more we can trust that the ones we do need will get to ous in time, the easier we can put the less urgent stuff out of mind.