Turn off all social platform push notifications — each one…

When This Fires

• Immediately — this is a one-time environmental intervention with permanent benefits
• When attention feels fragmented by constant digital interruptions
• When you find yourself checking social media "just because" a notification appeared
• When building a digital attention management system (Govern your tool use with explicit policies)

Common Failure Mode

Selective notification management: "I'll keep notifications for important things and turn off the rest." The platform's definition of "important" is optimized for engagement, not for your priorities. Even curated notifications are variable-ratio triggers — each one is a "maybe something good" prompt. The clean intervention is all off: no push notifications from any social platform. Check on your schedule.

The Protocol

(1) Turn off all push notifications from every social media platform: Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube. All of them. (2) Keep notifications only for genuinely essential communication: direct messages from close contacts, calendar reminders, security alerts. If in doubt, turn it off. (3) Set scheduled check times: designate 1-2 daily windows for social media (Pre-define allocation rules for contested time blocks…). This replaces the interrupted-checking pattern with deliberate-checking pattern. (4) For the first week, notice the impulse to check when no notification prompted it — this is the residual habit responding to the absence of the variable-ratio trigger. The impulse will decay as the reinforcement schedule stops operating. (5) After one month without push notifications, evaluate: has attention improved? Has compulsive checking decreased? The answer is almost universally yes.