Do phone notifications hurt focus, even if I don't check them?

PursueUpdated 10 October 20265 sources

Short answer

Yes. In a 2015 Florida State University experiment, simply receiving a notification hurt performance on an attention-demanding task about as much as calling or texting, even when people never touched the phone. In a field experiment with 221 adults (Kushlev et al., 2016), people reported more inattention in the week their alerts were on.

01The cost of a ping

Researchers at Florida State University gave people a task that needed steady attention and let their phones receive notifications during it. Performance dropped when a notification arrived, even though nobody picked up the phone. The drop was about the same size as the one seen when people actually used the phone to call or text. The authors' explanation is that the notification starts a train of thought that has nothing to do with the task[1].

A field experiment points the same way over a longer stretch. For one week, 221 adults kept alerts on and their phone within reach; for another week, alerts off and the phone out of sight. With alerts on, they reported more inattention and hyperactivity, and more inattention went with lower productivity and well-being[2].

02How many we receive

In a one-week study of real phones, people dealt with about 63 notifications a day, mostly from messaging and email, and usually looked at them within minutes, silent mode or not[3]. That study is small and from 2014, so treat the number as a floor, not a fact about you.

03What the research doesn't say

None of this means every notification is harmful or that switching all of them off is the answer. When people turned off every alert for a day, they felt less distracted but also more anxious about being unreachable[4]. A randomized field experiment found that batching notifications helped more than either a constant stream or none at all[5].

The lab effect was measured over minutes, and the field results are self-reports. They do not diagnose anything; the inattention measured in a general population is not a clinical condition.

Something to try today

Pick the next hour that matters and put the phone out of sight with alerts off, then check it once at the end. That is the condition that helped in the field experiment[2].

Pursue

How Tre-Up approaches this

Pursue treats its own signal as a cost: every alert it sends spends some of the attention it is trying to protect. So it is designed to stay quiet unless it has a good reason to speak, and to send one signal, not a stream.

Tre-Up is an iOS app in development. Pursue is the AI inside it. This note describes research and design intent, not results from the app. Nothing here is medical advice.

Sources

Summaries are written in our own words from each source's abstract, public record or official text. Follow the link to read the original. How we write these notes

  1. 1.Stothart C, Mitchum A, Yehnert C (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41(4):893–897.Florida State UniversityOur summarydoi:10.1037/xhp0000100
  2. 2.Kushlev K, Proulx JDE, Dunn EW (2016). "Silence Your Phones": Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms. Proceedings of CHI 2016, 1011–1020.University of Virginia · University of British ColumbiaOur summarydoi:10.1145/2858036.2858359
  3. 3.Pielot M, Church K, de Oliveira R (2014). An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications. Proceedings of MobileHCI 2014.Telefónica ResearchOur summarydoi:10.1145/2628363.2628364
  4. 4.Pielot M, Rello L (2017). Productive, Anxious, Lonely: 24 Hours Without Push Notifications. Proceedings of MobileHCI 2017.Telefónica ResearchOur summarydoi:10.1145/3098279.3098526
  5. 5.Fitz N, Kushlev K, Jagannathan R, Lewis T, Paliwal D, Ariely D (2019). Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being. Computers in Human Behavior 101:84–94.Duke University · Georgetown UniversityOur summarydoi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.07.016

Keep reading

All notes
  1. 01Should I turn off notifications completely, or batch them?The best evidence favours batching. In a randomized field experiment with 237 people (Duke and Georgetown, 2019), getting notifications in three batches a day made people feel more attentive, productive and in control than the usual stream, while getting none brought few of those benefits and more anxiety and fear of missing out.Interruptions and attention
  2. 02Why is it so hard to get back to work after an interruption?Because part of your attention stays with the task you left. Sophie Leroy's 2009 experiments at the University of Minnesota call this attention residue: people who switched before finishing did worse on the next task, and a 2008 study by UC Irvine and Humboldt University researchers found interrupted people sped up to compensate, at the cost of more stress and frustration.Interruptions and attention

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