Notifications are a pox

TidBITS Talk
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Over the past few months in interactions with 20- and 30-somethings and 60-, 70-, and 80-somethings I’ve come to realize that notifications are an absolute pox on phone and computer users.

You’re sitting in a quiet living room, chatting, and there are incessant pings and twangs around the room for utterly useless information. It’s mostly because people can’t be bothered to say nay when they’re first asked to approve notifications, I think, but it’s also because people want to be notified when something is important and forget that software writers think everything their software reveals is important even though you think a news item about fish prices in Kuala Lumpur is utterly useless.

I’ve taken to encouraging people to go into Settings/Notifications and turning everything off except the three to five things they feel are most important. It’s a tedious fifteen minutes out of your day (it could be thirty seconds if Apple provided a turn-them-all-off button) but if my small sample is any indication people are very happy at the result.

Dave

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@Dafuki

Looks like this is already a big enough meme that the ad industry has jumped on it…

:face_with_tongue:

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Hear, hear! I’ve always been stingy when allowing notifications, but after retirement the biggest single stress reducing change I made was getting rid of the last of them. Not just the bings and banners, but the badges as well. I fired my bank when they kept insisting on sending me text messages at 3am to tell me a new bank statement was ready, even though I had turned off all notifications in my account profile (and, yes, they even ignored replying STOP to their texts). I turned off email badging. I now get notified of text messages only during work hours. Everything else – even voicemails – have to wait until I actually look at the computer or phone.

Silence is golden.

Edit: am curious where I can sign up for “fish prices in Kuala Lumpur” notifications, though :zany_face:

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Why, of course!

The Star

And, now you can get notified about important things you should be aware-of within seconds of the breaking news like:

Fake friend call scams on the rise again in Singapore

Dave

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Agreed! DND is wonderful for the ones missed

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Between Focus and Do Not Disturb you pretty much have the control you seek.

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I’m stingy with notifications and use Focus and DND on my phone.

My active notifications are limited to Phone, Messages, Reminders, Find My, Clock, my bank app, my CGM apps, Nest, and Waze (for “time to leave” notifications only). Beyond that, I allow a few other apps badges, just so I know when they have something to say without being actively bugged by it. I turn on notifications for certain messaging/communication apps (FaceTime, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) only when I’m expecting a ping that I don’t want to miss, and certain other apps when using relevant functions (like DoorDash, Uber, and RunPee (an absolute must for moviegoers with overactive bladders!)).

Then I use Focus and DND to keep those apps’ notifications to a minimum when I’m doing something important (like working or sleeping). I always let notifications from my spouse and my elderly mother through. Medical providers are allowed during work, but not overnight. Everyone else can wait.

I also am very restrictive about allowing websites and services permission to text me. No, I don’t want you to send me marketing texts, ever. Marketing emails I’ll allow, because I don’t have email notifications active on my phone. But there is no “special sale” that is ever important enough to me for you to interrupt my day with a text message.

The one that frustrates me is my CGM. The official Freestyle Libre app cannot be completely silenced by Silent Mode, Focus, or DND. It offers a “silent delivery” mode, but it limits that to six hours at a time, which won’t last me through a full night’s sleep. (And “silent delivery” actually will generate spurious notifications that remind you you’re using “silent delivery”, just to make it worse!) I use a CGM only to monitor my hypoglycemic diabetes; I’m not on insulin, and my body will release more glucose after a sharp drop, just more slowly than it should. So I’m not going to go into a hypoglycemic crisis while I’m sleeping, and most nighttime low alerts are actually due to an unavoidable flaw in the design of CGMs (continuous pressure, such as when laying on them, can cause them to produce false low readings), not genuine low glucose episodes.

My only recourse for this is to turn off notifications for that app when I go to bed and turn them back on in the morning. I don’t use that app for my primary source of casual readings anyway—I use a third-party app called Sweet Dreams, which relies on the LibreLinkup feature that allows you to share your readings with family members, for that, because it offers a wider variety of alerts and actually has a widget and Live Activity. (Why any CGM app wouldn’t include a widget baffles me. Why should I have to unlock my phone and launch the app just to quickly check my glucose level?) But because LibreLinkup relies on data from a third-party server, it’s not reliable enough to leave the official app out of the loop entirely.

Everything else? Screw you, app. I don’t ever need notifications from a game app. I don’t want news alerts. Social media is for when I actively want to engage, only. If I want to know about a sale at some store, I’ll check it directly. Y’all can wait until I actually launch you.

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I want to get notifications from some apps but don’t want to be disturbed by them, so for most notifications I have sound turned to “off”.

Also, I almost always have sound turned off anyway. I find the pings and noises of devices pretty annoying. Haptics are more than good enough for me - I get a gentle notification without bothering anyone else.

And, I am another who takes advantage of different focus modes. Similar to scheduled Do Not Disturb and Sleep Focus modes, Fitness focus (automatically started when I start a workout) allows only a few notifications in (messages from my wife and kids mostly). And I have a scheduled Morning focus from 7am to 11am that only allows a limited number of notifications. Most of these also turn off notification badges on apps so I am not distracted. And I only get mail notifications from specific contacts - I tend to look at mail once or twice an hour and don’t need to be notified when messages arrive.

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I’ve had good success configuring my phone’s Focus settings so it automatically goes into Do Not Disturb mode between midnight and 7:00am (the time when I’m usually asleep). So I can get text messages and other important notifications during the day, when I want to see them, but not when I’m asleep.

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Indeed. The first thing that site did was pop an alert in my browser asking for permission to send me alerts. They are on it. :wink:

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For anyone as bewildered as I was, CGM apparently means continuous glucose monitor.

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I’m a Mac user only (no iPhone, no iPad, no iOS).

I’d like to see a way to totally, completely, disable ALL notifications, so that I NEVER see one displayed in front of me again. Not for a software update. Not for anything.

Is there a way possible to do this?
Perhaps a process that can be disabled using terminal?

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I seriously doubt it. It’s been years since I’ve poked around the notification manager but I can say that it’s deeply integrated into the system. If you were to find the daemon and quit it, for sure it will start right back up.

In the meantime, you can go into System Settings / Notifications and spend a happy 20 minutes turning everything off. That alone should reduce your irritation level substantially. :slightly_smiling_face:

Dave

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Thanks for explaining where the controls for Notifications are hidden. Not relying much on a cell phone, I had not noticed them until they started popping up recently, and once I started noticing them I noticed a problem. They flash on the upper right corner of my desktop screen and within a flash they are gone, so I don’t know what they were trying to tell me. If the notification was important, shouldn’t they stay on the screen longer? Or have I done something wrong?

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Nope! :slightly_smiling_face:

In the notification settings for individual apps you’ll find a setting for banner style that offers a choice between persistent and temporary. And temporary is really temporary.

Dave

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A search for this string macos defaults write command to disable app notification in DuckDuckGo turned up this suggestion:

I haven’t tried this so I cannot comment on how effective it might be or whether there will be apps granted exceptions.

Or you can do as @Dafuki suggests and spend some happy time disabling them individually.

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Agreed, one of the first things I do on new computers (including those I set up for clients) is turn most of that crap off. Jeez, how did we EVER MANAGE without notifications about every little thing?

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My personal solution, which is foolproof: don’t even take the phone into the bedroom at night. There is still such a thing as alarm clocks, after all.

I totally agree that we need a button to TURN THEM ALL OFF at once, after which you could proceed to turn on the handful you really want. Dealing with them one at a time is a total pain.

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I keep my phone plugged in at night on my nightstand. But I have Focus set up so that between 10pm - 7am the only calls/texts that can come thru are my daughters. They’re adults (late 30s) but I want to be available to them in case of an emergency. They would never call/text during that time if it wasn’t an emergency.
The rest of the time, the only sound notifications I allow - iPhone, iPad, Mac - are phone calls & texts, no sounds for anything else. Anything else I get notifications only on icons.
Never give a store or website permission to text me unless it’s related to an expected delivery.

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We sprinted down the stairs — sometimes falling over — to answer the ringing landline? Or someone at the door?

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