How to stop being a notification slave?
It’s been almost 10 years that notifications invaded us, from your smartphone to your smartwatch.
So that you understand my digital life, here are the products I use to communicate:
1. With my family and friends, I’m mostly on Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Messages, Facebook Messenger and Zenly. And I‘m also a big fan of Flickr to share photos with family.
2. And at work (I’m cofounder at Lunabee Studio), I use Workplace, and also Slack, Signal, Telegram and Hangouts (with customers/partners).
It’s really convenient to get a notification, especially a notification bringing (immediate) value to you.
But very quickly, it became to me an important source of distraction, impacting my productivity, and even my personal life.
I’ll share with you what I’ve tried with these in-app notifications.
The objective is to make the most of them, without negatively impacting your life!
Zero notification
This first method is rather radical and efficient (and simple!). The idea is to turn off all notifications in your smartphone’s settings.
Second step: each time you have the feeling it would have been better to be notified «real-time», change your settings for this App only. And do that during 2 or 3 days.
You should quickly find a stable configuration of your notifications that way.
My recipe today
This is what I personally apply, after having iterated on my “Zero notification” method.
Keep 1–1
First, I consider that a 1–1 personal message requires a real-time notification. Someone talking to you (and only you) most of the time expects an answer. Well, this is in fact what you expect in real life, right 🙂?
This covers all messaging Apps such as WhatsApp, Hangouts, Messages, Slack, Facebook Messenger and so on.
Mute group conversations
But I do mute all group conversations.
And if it’s possible, I accept notifications if someone tags me explicitly in this group e.g. “hey @tom I have this question for you:…”.
On this screenshot of Workchat (Facebook Workplace’s messaging), you can see that you can deactivate notifications, but keep receiving notifications for “mentions”.
Time-critical apps
Second, I turned on all notifications coming from time-critical Apps. For instance, an app notifying you of an imminent danger (e.g. intrusion, or life threatening event, e.g. your Nest smoke detector).
Badge: the intermediate configuration
On iOS, if you want an intermediate configuration but still avoid interruptions, you need the configuration of this screenshot.
You turn on the badges (the little red badge on the App icon), and turn off all alerts.
You won’t be interrupted, but you can see at a glance if some Apps have new stuff available for you to read.
I use this for Flickr app for instance: I don’t want to be interrupted if someone comment one of my photo, but it’s nice to see on the App icon that I have 3 unread comments (without needing to open the App and check).
My recommendation
My recommendation, try this 1 month. I’m sure you’ll find it better than having a notification every couple of minutes…
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Lunabee Studio is a company creating premium mobile Apps in the Alps. We love mobile UX, iOS and Android. Follow us to keep up with our latest publications and news.
