Taking Control
Don't let notifications rule your life. Rule them instead.
It used to be the phone, ringing when people needed you. That was replaced with the vibrant Nokia jingle following you wherever you went, and Aol. letting you know that "You've got mail!" Then, it was the blinking LED on a Blackberry, or the faint buzz in your pocket, letting you now know whenever an email or call came in. Now, it's the ding-a-ling of iPhone notifications, ever-present every waking (and sleeping) moment, reminding us of every tiny bit of info in the world around us. Angry Birds wants you to get your reward of the day, some country you've never heard of just elected a new president, there are 15 new emails advertising products you don’t need, and that group texting app won't stop letting you know that all of your friends have way too much free time to waste chatting.
It's way too much. There's so much noise. You can't even find the info you actually need amongst all the unimportant notifications. Something's got to go.
So we turn on Do Not Disturb mode at night, put our phones on vibrate during the day, and get used to seeing red bullets with 3 digit numbers in the top corner of our app icons. Now we have a new chore: clearing out Notification Center, or trying hard to ignore it altogether
But notifications have a purpose, obviously: giving you instant access to the info you really need to know. That'd be great, if our devices were truly smart enough to filter out the junk and only send us what we really need. Instead, you have to do the filtering yourself — just once. After that, you'll find that notifications can actually be useful again.
Nixing Nonsense Notifications
First Law of Mobile Device Use: Never allow a new app to send you notifications, unless you know you want that app to notify you.
You know the routine: download a new app, open it, and it asks you to allow notifications, let the app access your pictures, and then asks you to rate the app before you've even had the chance to try it out. So we tap Ok, Ok, and, um, No thanks without even thinking. Yay, shiny new app!
Wait: there's the problem. The game you just downloaded likely has no real reason to send you push notifications. You never need to be interrupted during a meeting — or while you're trying to fall asleep — to be told that your crops are dying, or your birds want to kill pigs. You likely don't even need most of the notifications from your social networking apps, really. 99.9% of the time, you shouldn't allow notifications right off the bat. If you really like an app and decide you do want it to send you notifications, you can always go enable them. That makes far more sense than approving everything, only to have to turn it off later.
Once you've got that rule down, you're on the road to recovery, but you're not done yet. You still need to turn off the notifications for everything you've already enabled before, that you don't want to bug you now. So head to your settings, and turn off the notifications on everything you don't really think needs to notify you. Think it through, but most of the stuff there really doesn't have info that's so pressing and urgent it has to notify you. So take the nuclear option, and turn off all notifications from most of the apps. I'm sure you won't miss most of them — and you can always reenable them if you decide later that you really want notifications. The same options are there in iOS, OS X, Windows 8, and Android (though in Android, you'll have to turn off notifications in each app's settings), in order to get all of your devices to be quieter.
It's not just push notifications, though, that are the problem. You've got to stop getting so many emails, too. So when you sign up for a new account online, don't check the box saying you want emails from them, unless you really want to get emails from them. And whenever you see another ad you'd rather ignore in your Inbox, take the second to scroll to the bottom and click Unsubscribe. It'll take 20 seconds, and likely get you one last goodbye email, but you'll quit getting the same ignorable emails every single day. That should take away a good majority of the rest of your annoying notifications.
Is your phone still buzzing? No? Ok, good.
Stay Informed With the Stuff You Want
Remember when I said that notifications have a purpose? They still do, even if you just turned off every last notification from your phone and tablet and computer. Now, though, you've got to coax the ones you really want back.
Start by thinking through what you really want notified about. I'm sure you want to get the text messages from your closest friends and family, and likely want to get a notification if your boss sends you an urgent email. You might even like to get a notification if world war broke out, or if your favorite team won a game, or if your stocks dropped by a certain amount. You likely don't need a notification if someone liked your picture on Facebook, but you might like to get a notification if you got a private message on Facebook.
Now you've got options to make notifications work for you. You can turn back on notifications for the few apps you really want to let you know stuff, and tweak those to only send you the most urgent notifications you really want. Your email app can be set to only show notifications when you get emails from your "VIP" contacts; add the most important people in your address book to that list, and you'll only get important email notifications. Facebook and most chat apps like Line and WhatsApp, have similar settings, where you can fine-tune the notifications you get. I've turned off notifications from a group chat in Line, since none of the messages there are absolutely urgent, but left on normal individual message notifications so people can get ahold of me with Line. Twitter and App.net apps only notify me when I get direct messages; otherwise, any @replies aren't typically urgent enough to need me to check them right away. You can even add contacts to your "favorite" list, and set your phone to only ring when favorites call while the Do Not Disturb mode is on. You'll feel at ease turning off the rest of your notifications, knowing your family can still get in touch.
Now that your communications notifications are manageable, you can start adding in the other stuff you want to hear about: breaking news, major events, and such. But turning on bulk notifications from your favorite news app likely won't do the trick. Instead, you'll need to turn to IFTTT — as discussed in Issue 2 — to get the notifications you really want. You can start a new recipe there that'll send you a text — or perhaps a Boxcar notification, if you prefer — whenever there's a new news headline about the topic you're interested in, or when a certain stock drops below a number you set, or when your favorite team wins a game. You can even let it make you smarter, by letting you know when something you want to buy is on Craigslist, or when the forecast says it's going to rain, and more. You're going to get notifications, but this time, it's notifications you really want. And you can set this all up from your phone, and edit it anytime to cut out the noise if you're getting too many notifications, using the IFTTT iPhone app.
That's still likely going to make you miss out on some stuff, so if you really want to know what's going on in the world, you might want to add a news app that's not too chatty, and let it send you notifications. I keep the New York Times — my newspaper of choice — Newsstand app installed, with notifications enabled, and it typically only sends notifications about news that's important enough you'd want to hear about. That works well for me.
Notification Overload, Begone
“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance”
Staying free of notification overload isn't anywhere near as important as liberty and freedom — but it'll still take eternal vigilance. You'll have to stay on top of your notifications to make sure they don't start overwhelming you again.
But it's worth it. So start by not enabling notifications for every app that comes along, and take the time to tweak your notifications so you'll only get the most important stuff. You might find that you actually like your iPhone's ding-a-ling sound again.
No, you'll likely rediscover the bliss of quietness. And that's better.
Originally published on July 29th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 3
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