Finding on Mute All Strategy
Investigators have documented the widespread adoption of a communications management approach in which all audio notifications are silenced, and examined what is gained and what is lost.
Preliminary findings in this matter are issued with the acknowledgment that the subject is widespread, well-intentioned, and only partially successful. The mute-all strategy, in which a user silences audio notifications across some or all installed applications, has been adopted as a focus management technique. This report examines what the strategy accomplishes.
The investigation is sympathetic to the underlying impulse. The notifications are numerous. Their timing is indifferent to what the user is attempting to do. The strategy is a rational response to irrational volume.
The preliminary findings are as follows.
The first finding is that the mute-all strategy eliminates sounds without eliminating the underlying messages. The messages continue to arrive. Badges accumulate. The visual notification layer, which the mute-all strategy typically does not address, remains active. The silence is auditory only.
The second finding concerns re-engagement. Because the silenced messages continue to arrive without announcement, the user develops a compensatory checking behavior. They open applications to see whether anything has accumulated. The checking behavior occurs at an interval similar to the notification interval it replaced. The net cognitive load is comparable.
The third finding is distributional. When one communication channel is silenced, message senders redirect to other channels. The silenced application fills while the user is checking the unsilenced applications.
The absurd rule that has emerged from mute-all adoption is that achieving quiet requires active maintenance, including periodic unquiet, in order to process what arrived during the quiet.
The contradiction embedded in the strategy is that it was designed to reduce interruption and has produced a system of self-interruption to manage the backlog of uninterrupted arrivals.
These findings do not recommend reverting to full notification volume. The noise was also not working.
Investigation continues.