How Life Gets Better Without Notifications
Notifications are out of control. What started out as a necessary tool for keeping track of important app and service updates has morphed into a tangled mess of spam and unnecessary alerts by default . We can’t do anything on our smartphones without being interrupted by notification after notification, the same can be said for tablets and computers. Good enough. You may need some , but you don’t need as many as you have right now.
What notifications do you really need?
Of course, we all joke that the smartphone is used for everything except phone calls, but this is not true. Without phone notifications, we would miss everything from important calls from doctors or government agencies to emergencies from family and friends. You will probably regret sending all these people to voicemail.
Of course, most of the calls we intercept on a daily basis are spam, and turning off phone notifications will get rid of these scammers. But software features like Unknown Caller Disable have improved things. You don’t have to turn off phone alerts completely to avoid spam.
Next, messaging. Most of us don’t want to miss messages from friends and family. Although most of the messages are out of time or indicate an emergency, we still want to keep up to date. If you’re constantly skipping texts from friends, or opening the Messages app to find group threads with dozens of messages, it’s more annoying than the alerts themselves.
Most Notifications You Can Live Without
Other than that, I think you can turn off most other notifications without a problem. Browsing through my Notification Center reveals all the “important” things I missed when I wasn’t around my iPhone: Stories from the New York Times; the Health app, congratulating me on getting enough sleep; Snapchat asks me to review my memories from five years ago; Instagram tells me who I should follow, among other things. Not to mention, these notifications stack on top of each other, so the true number always looks ridiculous. Who can even read them all?
Some apps go even further by abusing their alerts to spam you with ads. For example, I keep notifications for my Furbo as it lets me know when my dog is barking when I’m away. At 5am I got a notification from them about a free trial of their paid subscription. So Furbo is offline for now (sorry if my dog barks, neighbors).
We pile up so many apps on our smartphones, tablets, and computers these days that our notifications get out of hand all too easily. I think the best way is to force yourself to check those notifications and alerts every time you open the app. Instead of interrupting one of your many social media apps every moment, a news alert you don’t need to know right now, or an update in one of your games, you should wait until you want to interact with the app to find out. these things.
It’s like checking lots of little mailboxes scattered across your devices, not having dozens of email workers pushing hundreds of emails through your windows 24/7.
If you can’t turn off all notifications, change your settings.
However, everyone’s use case is different. For some, deleting all notifications will work, but for others, a more sophisticated approach will be required. If you live off the calendar and app notifications, it can be difficult to turn them off. You don’t want to check Google Cal only to see that you missed three meetings this morning. Of course, you’re less likely to miss a calendar alert if your Notification Center is free of junk and spam.
If there are apps that you want to receive some notifications from but not others, dive into the app’s settings to see what you can do. Let’s take BeReal for example. I want to know when “it’s BeReal time” because that’s the whole point of the app, but I don’t need to know exactly when other people post late or when they comment on my post. This is provided in the application settings, as it allows you to turn off all notifications, except for the main two-minute warning.
When you have time, review the notification settings for different apps. You might be surprised to learn how customizable they are and how many random and inappropriate alerts are included without your consent.
The companies are also working on the notification issue. For Android 13 , Google is now forcing apps to ask for notifications as the initial permission . Apps will no longer be able to spam you by default. If you say no from the start, you will never hear about this app again. The habit of disabling notifications for every new app you download will pay off handsomely.
Apple is also using this strategy, among other things. Starting with iOS 15 we have Focus , a feature that allows you to set filters to change the notifications you receive throughout the day. You can turn off all notifications except notifications from professional apps during business hours, and then turn off those notifications and return to notifications from friends, family, and approved apps outside of business hours. There is also a notification summary that saves and compiles your non-urgent alerts into a report that you receive once or twice a day.
Whether you take the time to fine-tune your notifications or say “fuck it” and turn them all off, this issue is worth tackling. Our smartphones should make our lives easier and even help us focus. Not necessarily the other way around.