Intention

I try to keep notifications in my life to a bare minimum. I get tips from friends or co-workers about making sure notifications on my phone are disabled while I sleep. I disable them all the time. The one thing I allow are text messages to vibrate my Garmin watch, and I’m on the fence as to whether this is truly necessary.

There are people who’s professions wont allow this. I get that. But I also know that most people build narratives about getting a late night text about the health of a loved one to justify always getting pinged when Facebook needs your attention, or a new email comes in. These are largely untrue, or at least building a process into your life for events that may never happen.

The idea here, cribbed from Bryan Cantrill’s talk on oral traditions in software development, is the importance of making as clear as possible your intentions when you do things. Often I feel as though intention gets a bad rap. The road to hell, and what-not. But the reality is that, if you are doing something, it is best to do it with intention. God help us the things we do impulsively or emotionally. Sometimes they work out alright, but it’s usually best to go back and see if we can learn why it happened. That’s still applicable when doing things intentionally, but because there was forethought, we are already a step ahead.