Mind the Silence

After 8 years, I’m no longer at PriceSmart. More significantly, after 3 years, I’m no longer involved in SRE, DevOps, Service Desk, CABs, or daily IT operations of a regional retailer. And the absence of alarms, alerts, beeps, boops, pings, and/or rings has been… deafening.

A while back, I got into the healthy practice of muting everything by default and then selectively enabling notifications based on importance. Still, the stream of stuff was considerable and – honestly – entertaining.

Over the past week, I catch myself picking up my phone or tab-switching to check… nothing. It’s true that the alerts usually meant something needed attention, but it also meant it was time to solve a puzzle. Healthy or not, there was a dopamine hit there.

I’ve been trying to apply Habit Stacking from Atomic Habits for this muscle memory. I’ve placed my Ebook and Audiobook apps in the spots where Teams and PagerDuty had been on my home screen. And if I pick up the phone for a phantom alert, I have to read an article I’ve previously saved for later.

I still need to work on content creation. That muscle has atrophied a bit due to corporate life, but I’m planning to strengthen it by writing here more often.