As developers, we have keep too much in short term memory. When was the last time we integrated with master? When was this feature supposed to be turned on in production? Where are we? Who are we? With all of these questions, the addition of social networking we are far too distracted to be as efficient as we should be.

Since the introduction of ‘Do Not Disturb’ across the iOS/OS X framework I have come to know, and love it. It has freed us from the bounds of push notifications and the binding chains of e-mail. Turning it on, you are now notified quietly in the background about what is going on in your eLife. Before this functionality, we were bombarded with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn/iMessage/Email notifications that are distracting more times than not.

Please allow yourself to break free from the hell that is synchronous notification. All of the tools we use are only as good as how we use them. You simply cannot bring yourself to deleting your eLife, so we have to learn to live with them inside the workflow of our daily life. ‘Do Not Disturb’ is one such way we can all do this successfully.

‘Do Not Disturb’ should have been named ‘Do Not Distract.’ We speak a lot about context switches as a bad thing in our software, so why could it be a good thing in our minds? Stopping these context switches will allow you to sharpen your focus on what matters. Perhaps right now email matters, which often times it can, you won’t be distracted by Twitter telling you that you’ve been followed by a cat.

Do ourselves a favor, work less distracted for a day. Silence all notifications and simply focus on your tasks. We will find out that perhaps push notifications weren’t such a great idea when it comes to productivity.

Keep in mind that your mileage may vary with this. I’ve come to find that it is so useful to allow me to sit and be focused on the task at hand, and then when I am ready I can switch my context to either the next notification that is waiting or something else entirely. My productivity has gone up since utilizing this tool. Many others like it exist, but my iPhone is my information hub so ‘Do Not Disturb’ is exactly what I use and love.