Apple has kind of made things worse in the recent macOS, where my phone's notifications show up on the desktop now. Like, man, I was already drowning in them before anyway, I don't want them on two screens now.
You probably already know this if it was bothering you, but just in case: System Settings -> Notifications -> toggle off "Allow notifications from iPhone".
I would also argue, regardless of what mobile OS you're on, quieting, delaying, or disabling notifications on a regular basis (and taking stock of what you let through) is prudent.
I'm always shocked whenever I see someone having hundreds or even thousands of unread notifications. It pains me to see that instead of controlling their feed to only what interests them, they've just let everything pile up forever, completely unread.
For example, on Discord, I sometimes see people with unreads for every server, and dozens to hundreds of completely unread DMs, just because they don't know that you can turn notifications off for the stuff you don't care about. Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything, leading to a disorganized mess.
I'm somewhat familiar with what typically leads to this (usually something like ADHD), but when you let it go for so many years it's such a big task to fix it that the fixing never happens and you're just kind of screwed for eternity.
In Discord, I have no unread servers and no unread DMs, despite being at the server limit. This is because all my servers are completely silenced and all my DMs are read immediately. My only unread email is one I marked as such because I still plan to reply to it soon. I have the attention for every single notification because I aggressively optimize the notifications I receive to the point where they all are typically things I care about. Back in the day I would instantly report every email to SpamCop, typically in under one minute, but I eventually stopped doing that because there's no point.
I simultaneously do and don't understand people who just submit to a flood of irrelevant garbage. Control it!!
> Instead of doing that they just learned to ignore everything
Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all.
A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.
Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.
> Leading to notifications being ignored, and not mattering at all.
You found my point! Some notifications may be important, but if one has learned to ignore all notifications, then they won't catch the important ones anymore.
When I get important notifications, I can act on them immediately, because I have not learned to ignore all my notifications, because I don't need to. I have taken care to block any notifications I don't care about, leaving only the ones that I do.
> A well curated set of notifications that only gives you the things you actually need is superb, but incredibly difficult to get right.
Ehh... maybe it's incredibly difficult to fix once you are already drowning in them, but since I immediately nuke anything I don't like from orbit, and have done so my whole life, there are a lot fewer things I don't like than if I hadn't to do that.
> Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.
I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.
> > Learning how to ignore all of the noise is probably a more valuable skill for a future where control is slowly wrestled away from the user. A certain Black Mirror episode (Fifteen Million Merits) comes to mind.
> I have a really hard time ignoring noise. I think that is because of my autism. Ignoring noise would be a nice skill, I guess, but I feel significantly better when the noise is simply not there in the first place. I'd imagine most would, but for some reason I seem to break a lot more easily when uncomfortable.
I share this discomfort, but only in physical space. I struggle with visual and audible noise in the real world, but my screen I’ve become very adept at ignoring. Giving up on inbox-zero in my personal life and ending up with 2000+ unread emails in my personal mailbox is where that started.
I unfortunately don't share this ease. As an example, I have to use custom CSS to completely remove blocked messages from Discord, because once I know a blocked message exists I can not seem to ignore it. The only way to properly protect myself from blocked users is to ensure that I can never even know they're there.
I do a similar thing for muted DMs. Once I know that someone has sent a message, I cannot seem to avoid checking the message. The only way for me to properly take a break is to ensure that there's no way for me to accidentally discover the existence of new messages. So I have some JavaScript that completely removes muted DMs from the list so that I won't even see them jumping back up to the top every new message.
I don't know what causes this to happen or how to fix it, but I do know that ignoring things has always been nearly impossible for me. Whenever there is anything I need to protect myself from, I need to also protect myself from ever noticing any related activity.
Maybe this is some sort of OCD, I'm not sure. Pretty sure it would meet the criteria, I guess.
That sounds like a lot of work. Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.
Again, it is a lot of work if you have to do it at once. If you've done it naturally over the course of your life, you would never have had a big pile of things to take care of at once.
> Alternatively, I can just ignore them all. I don’t care if there’s a red circle with a number in it. I don’t notice it and it doesn’t bother me.
Suit yourself. Personally, I care about responding promptly to certain things, like instant messages or emails, but I don't appreciate unwelcome distractions.
> Personally, I care about responding promptly to certain things, like instant messages or emails, but I don't appreciate unwelcome distractions.
Sure, if I’m being paid to respond right away then I will. The “instant” in “instant message” describes the delivery time, not the required response time. Email, IM are things I all treat asynchronous communications. Anything urgent should be a phone call, ideally. If there’s a particular email address I consider important I’ll make a separate inbox for it.
Otherwise, I find sort of fun to see how big the number can get.
On my work email I just mark everything as read at the end of the day so the number starts over each day.
Discord is really awful about this, and that's one of the many reasons I dislike it. Its defaults are bad. I should be able to set, at the account level, the default that servers don't send me notifications. I believe by default, I only get @everyone and @role notifications, which is only a few taps per server. But every time I join a new server, I have to remember to do it. If I didn't actively care about notifications from one particular server, I'd just block Discord notifications entirely and stop managing them in their app at all.
It's not really a matter of not knowing it can be done, it's that the mental effort of curating it is not really worth it (short term, anyway), because then I have to decide what's a worthwhile notification and what isn't.
