Even if you wanted to forget, you can’t.

Recently we bought tickets to an outdoor concert for a fairly prominent Australian artist doing a 20-year anniversary tour. The tickets were moderately expensive, but not ridiculously priced. The event was several weeks away, so I pushed it to one side of my brain and focused on other things.

It was one week before the concert. I knew the event was coming, because I had put it in my calendar. After all, who would run the risk of forgetting about it, after paying all that money?

Then the reminders began. One week beforehand, with the subject: “Don’t forget – your event is coming up soon!” The same email was sent twice within two minutes. I assume this rapid-fire emailing was an error.

Now it’s Wednesday, mid-week. Another reminder arrives telling me not to forget about the event. And on the day of the event itself, I receive yet another two emails reminding me that “Today is the day!” If I had wanted to forget about this event, it would have been impossible to do so. One can only imagine how many more reminders I would have received if I had opted in to notifications from the ticketing app that is used for event entry.

Obviously, I find all of these reminders annoying. Especially because I’m a fairly organised person – I rarely forget about or am late to an appointment. So it could be that I’m in the minority – everybody else in society is running around disorganised as all hell, while I represent the peak of organisational skill. But I don’t really think that’s it. There would be many people as organised as me, if not more so.

Do rich people not care about wasting money?

So what’s really going on here? Are there really people out there who would spend multiple hundreds of dollars and then not bother to attend an event like this? To simply shrug it off, with a “Whoops, I completely forgot!”

If the rare glimpses of news that I do happen to observe (I don’t pay much attention) are anything to go by, many people are struggling with the rising cost of living. So could it be that just the filthy rich people are the ones shrugging off these missed events, all the while lighting up their Gurkha Royal Courtesan cigars with flaming one-hundred dollar bills?

I don’t think so. I imagine you don’t really get rich by wasting money like that. And you certainly don’t stay rich by being frivolous with money either. It doesn’t seem likely that people are requiring so many reminders only due to carelessness.

So many reminders, so few things to be reminded about.

My concert example is only one of many. When I order something online – depending on the delivery company – I might receive up to six different notifications.

“Your package has been shipped!”

“It’s on its way!”

“It’s out for delivery!”

“It’s with the delivery driver!”

“It has been delivered!”

“Tell us what you thought about our delivery!”

Then there are reminders for restaurant bookings, physiotherapy consultations and any other sort of appointment you can name. Are they helpful? Occasionally. But most of the time, I know exactly when an appointment is due, so usually they add little value.

What they do add is a lot of clutter to my email and text messages. The funny thing to consider is that for every appointment or package sent, you may be notified at least two to three times. So if you had one-hundred notification-worthy events in a year, you can expect anywhere in the realm of two to three hundred notifications, and even more if you aren’t careful about the notification settings on your various devices.

Power and automation is a potent combination.

In the examples we’ve seen so far, it’s fairly evident that there is a pattern here. There are a few things to notice. Firstly, notifications come from organisations that are more powerful than most of the individuals they exist to serve. Second, these notifications are automated and mostly one-way communication. There is no personal connection here – each message is transactional in nature.

Due to this power imbalance, we have limited ability to push back on notifications. It’s unlikely that if I called up Amazon customer service that I could convince them to turn off notifications for my deliveries. These sorts of settings are system-wide in nature. I just logged into Amazon to check my notification settings and found that I have already turned them all off – but I’ll still receive many notifications from the delivery companies that they use, and I can do nothing about them.

I guess I could go to all the possible courier companies and tell them to stop notifying me, but this would be a tedious and time-consuming task, if it was even possible. Hence, nothing changes – I – as well as many others – will continue to be bombarded by these notifications.

If instead, it was my friend who was sending me notifications about their upcoming party, I could send them a message telling them that I don’t need them, and there would be a good chance that they’d stop. But even so, I probably wouldn’t say anything in this case, because the reminder is likely to be more personal in nature.

Unfortunately, it seems that we are powerless to stop these notifications from intruding into our lives.

Reminders exist for a reason.

Let’s hold on a minute, though. I always like to look at both sides of an argument. And it’s true that reminders exist for a reason. Reminders are sent mostly by organisations – so what makes them do this?

Well, the first obvious answer is that it’s about money. Businesses like healthcare providers and restaurants will lose money if people don’t show up for their appointment, because they could have booked someone else in their place. While you can limit the damage by having cancellation or no-show fees, it’s always better to just have the person show up as they planned.

What about my concert case? Well, the promoter of this particular artist was sending reminders because the more people that show up, the more food and drink people will consume and pay for at the venue, especially at an outdoor picnic-style event with balmy weather. But there is also a reputational element to this. What would the artist think if the promoter was unable to attract a big audience? They’d likely look for someone who could do better. While they’d still probably receive the money (because a customer just failing to show up is not usually a good reason for a refund), it wouldn’t look or feel good to play in front of a half-empty venue.

Another reason for businesses to send these reminders is to limit liability. If a delivery company didn’t notify me about my package and then it was stolen off my porch or delivered to the wrong location, you could argue they’d been negligent because they hadn’t given me the chance to make a correction or look out for the package. In other words, reminders help businesses say “We’ve done our best to tell you what’s happening and if something goes wrong, that’s on you”.

Of course, we don’t want to dismiss the possibility that businesses are sending a squillion reminders for purpose-based reasons. If they really believe their products and services benefit people, then it’s much more helpful for the customer if the customer actually shows up to an appointment or receives the product as promised.

The one-size-fits-all solution.

Somewhere along the line, market research was carried out to try to reduce the chances of no-shows, missed appointments or missed deliveries. And the research was clear – if you send people reminders, they’re less likely to miss an appointment, sue your company for negligence or cancel at the last minute.

As an example, in the healthcare setting where non-attendance can cause big operational issues, research has shown that simple SMS reminders work. They’re easy to automate, so nobody needs to put in too much effort once they’re in place.

But it’s interesting to think about what this means. For someone like me, who is fairly organised and generally likes to operate in a “mediumly-busy” fashion, I don’t need those reminders. When I receive them, it’s a little annoying because they are generally telling me about an appointment that I already know is coming, followed by needing to unlock my phone to go and clear the notification.

What the flood of notifications and reminders is really doing is catering for the people on the planet who are most likely to miss something. Effectively, everyone is being treated as if they are disorganised or overwhelmingly busy, distracted and forgetful. And because it’s so easy to automate a reminder, nobody at the organisation is even thinking about them being sent – they just go out instantly when the time is right.

The automation means that we aren’t really deciding who needs a reminder, or being intentional about turning them on or off. They’ll just go to every customer by default. And because research suggests it’s good for business, if an organisation doesn’t spam people with notifications, you may feel as if you are leaving precious money on the table. The end result then becomes that all companies send reminders and notifications by the digital bucketload, for fear of falling behind the competition.

Creepy.

One day many years ago, somebody received the world’s first text reminder. At that time it would have been a surprise – possibly a welcome one. You might even have heard someone exclaim “Wow, this is so convenient – it reduces the chance of missing my appointment.” Soon, notifications became more common. And over time, we received more and more reminders and notifications for everything from appointments and restaurant bookings to parcel deliveries.

At one time or another, we may have felt frustration at receiving a reminder that we didn’t feel we needed. But eventually, we became desensitised. Reminders and notifications simply became part of the background noise that floods our consciousness like plastic bottles washed up on a pristine beach. We don’t really notice them so much anymore.

We don’t notice them, and because the process of sending them is automated and cheap, businesses aren’t needing to think about them either. They’re just part of the world now, for better or worse. Businesses that are formed from the effort of individuals are sending millions of reminders to other individuals who don’t even really want to receive them. Even if you benefit from the occasional reminder, there’s a good chance you don’t need every one of them that comes your way.

It’s the gradual creep that is the concern. The reminder and notification creep that gradually embeds itself as part of regular society, without anyone really batting an eyelid or questioning where we’re really going with all this. And even if we do stand up and take notice of it or attempt to change it – we’re powerless, pushing back against entrenched systems that are just part of the way we do things around here now.

These systems were created by individuals, but now they fail to really serve them.