How I use BuzzKill to stay focused and in the moment
Phones are incredibly useful, but they’re also incredibly annoying sometimes. There’s been a rise in “light phones” and “analog” tech and I think it’s at least partially down to how much attention our phones demand from us at all times. One of the best and worst features of phones are push notifications. BuzzKill can help tame them so you get the good parts, like not needing to constantly check each app, but without a lot of the bad parts like constantly being distracted.
Cooldown
Cooldown is one of my favourite rules and was the entire reason I built BuzzKill 6+ years ago. If you’re part of a group chat, then you’ll often get notifications in quick succession as people are constantly replying to each other. I find that very distracting and annoying, so I built the cooldown feature to help me avoid that. Essentially it allows you to “mute” subsequent notifications for a set amount of time, so you’re only notified about the first notification. That way you know there’s a message, but you don’t need to hear your phone’s notification sound for all 10 messages in a row.
You set it up like this:
When I get a notification from WhatsApp then cooldown for 5 minutes
You can customise it to either mute or dismiss the subsequent notifications and also configure the amount of time, as well as the usual customisations like apps, times, locations, group chat names etc…
Pocket check
Pocket check is a fairly new feature for BuzzKill and solves the problem of having to pull your phone out of your pocket just to check if you have any new messages. I find that once I’m already looking at the phone’s screen then my brain goes on autopilot and often will unlock it and get sucked into doom scrolling or something equally unimportant. You can set it up like this:
When I get a notification from Messages that contains “Wife” then pocket check
Now BuzzKill will keep track of any messages that I’ve received from my wife that I haven’t seen yet and whilst my phone is in my pocket I can press the power button and it will vibrate to indicate if there are any new messages. That way, without ever looking at my screen I can do a quick check to know if I need to look at my phone. If not, I never need to look at my phone and can stay in the “moment” and focused on where I am or what I’m doing.
Custom alert
Another feature that I’ve been using for a while is custom alert. This allows you to assign specific notifications a custom vibration pattern or sound. For example, you can make it so messages from your wife that contain “daughter’s name” have a specific vibration pattern. Or an out for delivery notification has a specific sound. Whatever you want. With custom alerts you can know what a notification is without needing to look at the phone and read it.
Conclusion
Together these rules help me stay focused and avoid distractions, allowing me to be more productive and present in my daily life. There’s also a few other features that I use that I haven’t mentioned here but could be useful to you. Such as automatically dismissing notifications whilst a rule is active (e.g. when you’re in a certain location), or automatically replying to notifications with a canned response that you’ll get back to them later.