For the past month or so, I’ve turned off or uninstalled Growl on all my Macs. I won’t be reinstalling it.
For the unfamiliar, Growl is a system that can give you notifications about events that happen on your system. The list of things that it can tell you about is quite extensive and range from when you get a new email or IM to when your system mounts a volume1. It’s kinda a fiddily thing, but if you use an app like Adium or Dropbox2 you probably have some version of it installed.
It’s a great product, some great people work on it, and it’s a valuable service when you need to be notified that a thing happened. It’s also easy for that value to be lost when you’re buried in notifications.
But I noticed something: constantly being notified of the myriad of things happening on a modern computer were taking their toll. One by one each sign-out event chipping away at my concentration. And the email. Oh God, the email!
Ultimately, I was spending more time reacting to notifications then I was actually making things.
Notifications are like a candy bowl for your attention span
When your environment makes it easy to consume a given thing chances are, you’ll consume it at a higher rate than if it was more difficult to obtain. For example, if there’s a candy bowl next to your desk, you’ll be likely to eat more candy than if that bowl was across the room3.
Notifications are that candy bowl shoved into your face. They appear over other windows, they stack down the screen, They’re relatively large and obvious in your peripheral vision. In short: they’re disruptive by design.
You don’t need to know everything to make something
Most of the things you can be notified about when doing creative and information work aren’t really things you need to respond to right away. IMs, email, iTunes track changes4. The most important thing is that code, design, spec or whatever else I’m making right now, bar none5.
Anything that takes away form that has little value. So Growl goes until I find something that legitimately needs to be disruptive (but that’s not a lot).
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The official explination is on Growl’s about page, along with a list of apps which use the system ↩
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Despite some political issues between the growl and dropbox teams. ↩
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It’s called mindless eating, and it’s based on empirical evidence that our environment changes how we consume food. ↩
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Really? Listening to the song change not good enough? ↩
