On the heels of my excitement about the Lotus Traveler support for the iPhone (which is an AWESOME implementation, btw … I can’t stress that enough) I now found that my iPhone is doing something very annoying suddenly: telling me when I have email.
Let me explain. The first “smart phone” device I ever used was the Treo 650, which was great at the time. It changed my life by doing something the IT industry would later call “blurring free and work time.” Every 15 minutes (30 if I knew I wasn’t going to be near a charger all day) the phone would replicate and buzz me with an alert about a new email message.
I then moved to using the GOOD service on a Windows Mobile device and the blur got much more hazy. With GOOD my phone was aware of new emails instantaneously (even before my Notes client in most cases) and immediately called my attention to them. It felt like two years of having a hybrid of texting, instant messaging and email.
Enter: the iPhone, and my pseudo-clumsy method of getting it to check my corporate email. I now went back to a replication schedule and the contrast was stark – so much so that I actually stopped paying attention to the iPhone’s email alerts altogether and only checked email when *I* wanted to. That’s good and bad, for a variety of reasons.
I have now been using Traveler on my iPhone for a whole 24 (almost) hours and my iPhone has become much more annoying (or helpful, depending on the email) about alerting me to email. Why? Its alerting me in the exact same method (sound & buzz). However, there must be a Pavlovian response to the iPhone’s former replication SCHEDULE that I must have not been aware of. I must have subconsciously dismissed alerts about new email since they were coming every 15 minutes based on the schedule I setup.
Now that Traveler delivers emails near-instantly, the iPhone is buzzing on its own schedule and drawing my attention to it. Which, all in all, is a good thing. I had previously said that the iPhone was the easiest email notification system to ignore. I see now that was due to a replication schedule that was predictable on a subconscious level.
If any of you are psychology students looking for a great thesis idea… you’re welcome.
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