For some households, Monday evening is marked by everyone coming together to watch a specific TV show. For my family, the tell-tale sign the week has begun is the endless series of pings as TeamApp notifications arrive in unison to me and my husband, filling our phone screens with alerts and spamming our inbox.
Like clockwork, at 8pm, just as we are about to sit down and unwind after the first day of the working week, my daughter’s football-netball club sends its hundreds of members a series of 11 photo galleries of the weekend’s matches. That is on top of any other news deemed significant by whomever has been given the significant power to send out notifications.
I admit I enjoy quickly flicking through the mediocre sports action shots taken by amateur photographers – i.e. parents, including me – of my daughter and her teammates giving it their all on the court. But do I need to receive 11 separate push notifications, including for photos of under-17 boys I do not know attempting to take a speccy?
The volume of information is overwhelming. Some say I should turn the push notifications off. But that risks missing something important. More than once I have missed relevant information – including a school excursion – because it was lost in the sea of other notifications, which, ironically, defeats the purpose of these apps.
For many of us, this excess of information means what would be a relaxing weekend afternoon with a cup of tea instead becomes a dedicated time to sift through the hundreds of accumulated messages from the week.
One parent of a primary aged child said they were alarmed to receive a message titled “Unexplained student absence” regarding the child they had dropped off at the school gates that morning, only to open it to find a generic message reminding parents to explain all absences to the school.
On top of the overload of messages, there’s the sheer number of apps used as official communication, whether for school, extracurricular activities, sports or whatever. For my two kids, I have four school-specific apps, six groups in one app for different sporting groups, plus another three apps for wider sporting associations.
There are apps that allow only one login email, which causes unnecessary friction for parents who are separated. Even when parents are together, the system is flawed, with one parent often becoming the master of information, a role no one really wants.
Non-parenting-related apps are just as bad. Whether it’s banking, shares, emergencies, your favourite department store, productivity, news, even mindfulness apps, they all seem to operate on the belief that the more updates and notifications interrupting you, the better.
“I once received several notifications from my mindfulness app within an hour or so telling me to take a break, to do some deep breathing, etc, while also reminding me to fill out my daily check-in because it is important,” one friend told me.
“The reminders just compounded my anxiety.”
A co-worker told me: “At one point, I had so many productivity apps, from calendars to workflow charts, and spent so much time updating them that I never actually got my tasks done.”
Many of these messages are far from urgent – for example, a recent news update from my daughter’s primary school, on the official Compass app. Supposedly reserved for important updates such as power outages, events, newsletters or early dismissals, this app offered the following news item: “Missing School Shoe.” Along with a detailed and emotive plea for the school community to look out for this normal, run-of-the-mill school shoe, it included a sad photo of the shoe that wasn’t lost, like a photo of a missing child on a milk carton.
That same week – thankfully without a photo – on my eldest daughter’s high school communication platform there was a news item about a found retainer, including its current location, so the owner could collect it.
A few months and hundreds of phone notifications in, I am able to identify every netball or football player who has played at our club this year, whether I know them or not. But the question remains: was the retainer or the missing shoe ever reunited with their former wearers? Is there’s an app for that?
Shona Hendley is a freelance writer.
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