Every phone ping takes 7 seconds of your attention – here’s how to get it back

A new study has found that each notification can distract you for about seven seconds
The more personally relevant the notification, the more distracting it is
Phones have tools to help solve this, such as focus modes and other settings

You probably don’t need a study to tell you that smartphone notifications can be distracting, but it turns out they’re even more distracting than you might think.

According to a new report that will be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior (via CNET ), it interrupts your attention for about seven seconds every time you get a notification on your phone. Considering how many notifications you’re likely to get in a day — with study participants receiving about 100 a day, for example — it can really add up.

The study involved having 180 university students perform a Stroop task – that’s a test that involves colored words flashing on a screen. The words spell one color and appear in another, and the goal is to correctly identify the font color, ignoring what is written.

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Researchers divided the participants into three groups — one who received generic social media notifications on the screen while they performed the test, one who was told the notifications mirrored those on their phone, and one who had blurry notifications displayed in unreadable text.

iPhone 17 Pro has focus modes to limit notifications (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

In all cases, each notification was found to affect their attention for around seven seconds, but the effect was most pronounced among the group who thought the notifications mirrored them on their phone – showing that more personally relevant notifications are more distracting.

Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the study’s first author, told CNET that “we observed that both the volume of notifications and the frequency with which individuals check their smartphones were associated with greater disruption.”

“This pattern suggests that the fragmented nature of smartphone use, rather than simply the total duration of use, may be a key factor in understanding how digital technologies affect attentional processes.”

So how to address this? An obvious answer is to limit the possibility of notifications reaching you. On the iPhone, this can be done through focus modes, which let you customize which apps send notifications when a certain mode (such as ‘work’ or ‘sleep’) is active.

Depending on your Android phone, you may also have similar tools there, such as the Digital Wellbeing tools (which also include focus modes) on Pixel phones or a basic Do Not Disturb setting.

If there are some apps that you never want to receive notifications from, you can also permanently disable notifications for specific apps via that app’s section of your phone’s settings menu.

You may also want to take a closer look at how notifications are displayed, how many phones allow you to choose how prominent they are, or where they appear – these options are typically found in the notifications section of a phone’s settings menu.

You can also distance yourself from your phone and place it in another room, for example when you’re working, but if you’re wearing a smartwatch that doesn’t stop notifications on your wrist, and although the study didn’t look at wearables, we’d imagine the effect is the same.

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