It is very difficult to name what is important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. It’s super hard.

More and more I try to have fewer meetings, and to keep them short. In one of them, a short one by the way, I noticed that every couple of minutes I was looking at the iPad constantly. Why? App notifications kept coming in, and I kept looking and figuring out what they meant. My meeting was already short, and I was more focused on the damn notifications, instead of making my meeting, that was already short and productive, even more productive.

What was the problem? I hadn’t defined what was important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and not urgent and not important. The meeting was important and urgent, and the notifications were non-urgent and non-important.

Notifications create a sense of urgency around something that turns out not to be important at all. I don’t need to know right away that someone retweeted my tweet. I began to realize that a minimal change would have a huge impact.

“There are two types of people: one wants to control his environment, the other, struggles to keep his environment from controlling him. I like to control my environment.” – George Carlin

What I like best, by turning off all notifications, is that I now decide when I check my email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. And everything that happens, happens because of me. And it sounds weird, but I love that feeling. It was my fault that I got notifications, and by controlling that part of my environment, everything is sharper. And now that it’s my fault, I can work on myself and on getting better, and on checking those notifications less often.

I highly recommend you try to do that.