I gave myself permission to stop working on my laptop and instead enjoy watching "Game of Thrones" which I had purchased on DVD.
Although I was off the laptop, my smart phone continued to ping, ding, zing and chime with alerts from my mail.com, Viber, Gmail, SMS and Facebook apps.
At the sound of these alerts I'd jump up like a jack rabbit and fumble for my phone.
In all honesty I was attending to the part of me that needed to know what's happening in the world, but the other part of me was so furious at being taken away from my leisure time.
Eventually I had enough and grabbed my phone and went into setting and stopped their sounds and appearance on my locked screen.
It wasn't long before I saw something remarkable happen. The room was quiet but it was more than just silence. I was experiencing inner calm.
In not reacting to the sounds of the phone, I felt so relaxed and peaceful.
So one good reason to turn off these notifications is to experience more inner calm which will improve your quality of life.
Yes that's right!
Why?
I stopped interrupting myself from being in the present moment. I wasn't multitasking.
You've probably heard about multitasking. It can be defined as performing two or more tasks simultaneously.
So reacting to the alerts on my smart phone was multitasking because I was switching back and forth from one thing to another.
We think multitasking or doing multiple tasks at once is increasing our productivity, but in reality our brains need time to switch from operating in one mode to another. In other words, it takes longer to do a number of things at once than one thing at a time.
So try this little experiment. Turn off all the sound notifications on your phone for month and only check your messages two or three times a day. I promise you will start tuning into the many beautiful moments that create your day, and have much more time to enjoy them.
