Phantom Obligations

[Nobody’s waiting.]
It’s been over half a decade since I first urged the meat-axing of notifications on your devices. I continue to feel strongly that turning off notifications and badges is one of the best changes you can make to enable a healthier relationship with technology. As I wrote in 2020:

The artificial urgency device notifications create is unnecessary, and probably unhealthy. Very few notifications are actually time-sensitive, yet far too many of us let our phones take us out of the moment needlessly.

Recently, Terry Godier published an excellent piece called “Phantom Obligation”, whose title is defined as “the guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do”. Badges on app icons on your phone are a prime example, with their widespread abuse resulting in countless such phantom obligations.

The notification badge took email’s unread count and made it universal. Any app could now claim urgency. A game wanting you to collect coins wore the same badge as a message from your mother.

Different messages have very different levels of importance, but badges have no granularity. Given that, the best move is to disable them almost everywhere.

Link: https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation/ascii