text: We report from the Do Not Disturb Challenge where 30 volunteers disabled notification alerts for 24 hours across all devices. The effect of the absence of notifications on the participants was isolated through an experimental study design: we compared self-reported feedback from the day without notifications against a baseline day. The evidence indicates that notifications have locked us in a dilemma: without notifications, participants felt less distracted and more productive. But, they also felt no longer able to be as responsive as expected, which made some participants anxious. And, they felt less connected with one's social group. In contrast to previous reports, about two third of the participants expressed the intention to change how they manage notifications. Two years later, half of the participants are still following through with their plans.
  @cite_37: Examining several sources of data on smartphone use, this paper presents evidence for the popular conjecture that mobile devices are "habit-forming." The form of habits we identified is called a checking habit: brief, repetitive inspection of dynamic content quickly accessible on the device. We describe findings on kinds and frequencies of checking behaviors in three studies. We found that checking habits occasionally spur users to do other things with the device and may increase usage overall. Data from a controlled field experiment show that checking behaviors emerge and are reinforced by informational "rewards" that are very quickly accessible. Qualitative data suggest that although repetitive habitual use is frequent, it is experienced more as an annoyance than an addiction. We conclude that supporting habit-formation is an opportunity for making smartphones more "personal" and "pervasive."
  @cite_33: We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations.
  @cite_29: The typical information worker is interrupted every 12 minutes, and half of the time they are interrupting themselves. However, most of the research on interruption in the area of human-computer interaction has focused on understanding and managing interruptions from external sources. Internal interruptions -- user-initiated switches away from a task prior to its completion -- are not well understood. In this paper we describe a qualitative study of self-interruption on the computer. Using a grounded theory approach, we identify seven categories of self-interruptions in computer-related activities. These categories are derived from direct observations of users, and describe the motivation, potential consequences, and benefits associated with each type of self-interruption observed. Our research extends the understanding of the self-interruption phenomenon, and informs the design of systems to support discretionary task interleaving on the computer.
  @cite_27: Desktop notifications are designed to provide awareness of information while a user is attending to a primary task. Unfortunately the awareness can come with the price of disruption to the focal task. We review results of a field study on the use and perceived value of email notifications in the workplace. We recorded users' interactions with software applications for two weeks and studied how notifications or their forced absence influenced users' quest for awareness of new email arrival, as well as the impact of notifications on their overall task focus. Results showed that users view notifications as a mechanism to provide passive awareness rather than a trigger to switch tasks. Turing off notifications cause some users to self interrupt more to explicitly monitor email arrival, while others appear to be able to better focus on their tasks. Users acknowledge notifications as disruptive, yet opt for them because of their perceived value in providing awareness.
  @cite_31: The negative aspects of smartphone overuse on young adults, such as sleep deprivation and attention deficits, are being increasingly recognized recently. This emerging issue motivated us to analyze the usage patterns related to smartphone overuse. We investigate smartphone usage for 95 college students using surveys, logged data, and interviews. We first divide the participants into risk and non-risk groups based on self-reported rating scale for smartphone overuse. We then analyze the usage data to identify between-group usage differences, which ranged from the overall usage patterns to app-specific usage patterns. Compared with the non-risk group, our results show that the risk group has longer usage time per day and different diurnal usage patterns. Also, the risk group users are more susceptible to push notifications, and tend to consume more online content. We characterize the overall relationship between usage features and smartphone overuse using analytic modeling and provide detailed illustrations of problematic usage behaviors based on interview data.
summary: Notifications & Engagement @cite_31 showed that notifications often trigger engagement with the mobile phone: in their data set, the majority (79 shown by Mark @cite_33 , when information workers are without (the interruption of) emails, they switch less between tasks. Similarly, Iqbal and Horvitz @cite_27 found that disabling email notifications leads to less frequent opportunistic email checking. Yet, not all interruptions are notification-triggered: in 2009, Jin and Dabbish @cite_29 found that in the case of information workers, 50 addition, Oulasvirta @cite_37 report that people frequently check their phones even if there are no notifications. We hypothesize that disabling notifications will reduce the engagement with the mobile phone, but not eliminate it.