Don’t Let Apps Interrupt Your Business

We’ve all heard of work-life balance, but maybe it’s time for tech-life balance. Which is probably easier to achieve, anyway.

Most people like to feel that they’re doing something productive that has a purpose: work. (This is but one of the many reasons that “No one wants to work anymore” is BS.) Yet burnout comes when your life revolves around work and there’s not enough life in the balance: when there’s not enough time spent on other activities that you enjoy, not enough time with family and friends, not enough time in nature, etc.

Similarly, a lot of tech apps can be very helpful. Computers are more accurate than human brains when it comes to calculations, sorting large data sets, and running reports. But people lose the ability to focus on their own work or enjoy the present moment when they’re constantly interrupted by their tech.

December 11 is National App Day, and the best way to celebrate just might be to turn them off (or at least the notifications).

Apps don’t produce automatic productivity improvements

Did you know the original Luddites didn’t hate all new technologies? Just the ones they thought were making the human condition worse, mostly by putting people out of work. Being a Luddite isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it turns out.

Tech can definitely give a business owner a short-term boost in productivity. For example, go from a spreadsheet that holds all your contacts to a customer relationship management (CRM) system. 

Once you’ve learned to use the app, you’ll be able to send follow-up tasks to your email so you don’t drop the ball, plus you have the ability to run reports such as customers who haven’t been contacted in the last six months. 

You can use the CRM to send emails so you have an automatic log of what you said to whom, and you can also attach meeting notes. That’s a lot more helpful functionality than you get from a spreadsheet.

There are plenty of business apps that will make life easier: funnels that send automatic emails when someone signs up for your mailing list, bookkeeping, scheduling social media posts so you can batch content, automated answering systems, inventory and logistics, and so on. They all come with a learning curve, but once you get beyond that you should see some productivity gains, at least short-term.

The problem lies not so much in the functionality, but in how business owners access them. Sometimes you can have so many different apps that it’s hard for staff to wade through them all.

The bigger issue is notifications. Usually, apps are installed with notifications turned on automatically. Don’t kid yourself that this is to help you in some way. It’s to make you as the customer “stickier”. If you don’t use the app, or use it only rarely, then it’s a lot easier for you to get rid of it altogether and stop paying the subscription fee. So the notifications are turned on to remind you to use the app.

Of course, social media platforms take this to an entirely higher level. They’re designed to be addictive so the platforms can make money by pushing ads in front of you. The longer you’re on the channel, the more ads they can promote. 

In other words, the notifications are great for the apps, but not for your brain when you’re trying to work. The notifications interrupt you so you can’t focus. 

Why notifications are so bad for productivity and effectiveness

Any interruption is bad for focus, whether it’s someone dropping in on you or your phone chiming or buzzing, or a flash on your screen whether it’s your computer or your phone. Interruptions are novel and the brain likes novel. Unless you’re in a hyper-focused state, notifications pull you away from what you’re doing.

Studies have shown that in some circumstances it takes 23 minutes to get back to where you were before the interruption. If you’re checking your email, a notification that you got an email isn’t that big a deal for your focus. But what if you’re doing something cognitively demanding like planning your 2024 strategy, working on a tax return, strategizing a legal brief, or preparing a financial plan?

You only get 4 to 4 ½ hours for that cognitively demanding work each day, assuming you’ve filled up your productivity tank. If your email notification goes off just once an hour during that time, you lose about an hour and a half of work (23 minutes for each interruption X 4 interruptions.) Which means you only have 2 ½ to 3 hours of focused work time that day.

Easy fix for tech-life balance

Work-life balance is hard, and it’s almost impossible to get the right balance every day unless you have lots and lots of help at work and at home. But over longer periods, including vacations and recharging time, you might be able to balance it out more equitably.

Tech-life balance is much simpler, but if you’re already addicted to checking your emails whenever you are not working or going down the rabbit hole on social media, you might not find it so easy. 

Just turn off your notifications. (Yes, email too. At the very least, during your focus time so you can accomplish the cognitively demanding work that powers your business.)

Many people can leave their business apps behind at the end of the day, but find social media harder. You should always have your social media notifications turned off. If you do some business online, use an autoreply that also forwards requests or have your ecommerce store automatically set to deal with customer orders. 

If this is hard, take your apps off your phone as well. I can only access my social media from my laptop, so I spend less time aimlessly scrolling. (Which doesn’t mean I spend no time scrolling! But it’s easier to set limits at my computer.)

Recap (tl;dr):

Apps can give you a temporary productivity boost, but they also make you less productive when you have notifications turned on. Turn them off to improve your effectiveness.

Switched from spreadsheets to apps but still not as productive in your business as you’d like? Schedule a free call here as I might be able to help you with more permanent improvements.