I think it’s a really bad idea to have a mobile device always on one’s person, which can “notify” one at any given moment. Computer usage can be bad enough, in distracting us away from our respective objects of meditation, but I find if I “aggregate” the things I actually need to do together, then spend time on a “workstation” computer (a stationary, not-always-on-my-person laptop in my case), then I get those things done way faster, and I also check in much less often to the messaging services where some new message might be waiting for me. I get back to people slower, but then I have long periods of uninterrupted time for meditating, etc.
I know Ajahn Brahm strongly encourages “only do one thing at a time”. Well, this is definitely in that vein. If I were to always respond to notifications that arrive, then that would majorly interfere with “only doing one thing at a time”.
Here was an interesting, recent experiment (done for several weeks) by a geek who decided to only do things online at a “Workstation”, not on a mobile device any longer (at least while not at events and conferences, which was a special case). I agree with him, “Workstation” (meaning, a stationary, not-transported-around computer, day-to-day) is the much more sane way to do things online (for contiguous, carefully planned, and thought-through tasks), not “always online” with mobile, where a lot of time gets wasted more easily (being frequently tempted to look at rather pointless things).
I apologize for the little commercials during his video, you might consider just fast forwarding through those…
