Sunday, December 19, 2021

Home Screen Effect

Have you ever had that problem that you need something from another room in your home, and you go to that room, and instantly forget what it was you came for? And you can't remember what it is until you go  back to the original room you were in? This is called the Doorway Effect, and it happens because your mind resets itself to focus on what is in the room that you just entered. The unfortunate side effect of this is that you might forget something important.

I experience something similar very often when using my iPhone, which I like to call the Home Screen Effect. I will often be doing something (not using my iPhone), and think about taking out my phone to do something, for example, search on the web, or take a note, or order something from Amazon, etc. Then I pull out my phone and wake it, and there is a notification, and I follow that notification and then forget why I brought out the phone in the first place. Or perhaps I open Safari and it is on a webpage I was looking at before and I get distracted by that. Or there is an unread badge on social media app that I open and get distracted by.

I even sometimes have this problem when using my computer if I have just context switched to it... I see a Safari tab from before and get distracted by that rather than doing what I need to do. I think there is a similar mental process when context switching into using a device to when we context switch into a new room. I don't remember this being an issue when I was first using the Mac many years ago, before the Internet and before multitasking. You would turn on the computer and open the application that you wanted to run and there were very few distractions because everything was so simple.

Similarly, before smart phones, when you wanted to make a phone call or even send a text message this problem didn't exist.

I think I need to figure out ways of changing my home screen to mitigate this problem.