Just Say No To (Most) Notifications

You know the feeling, you’re getting a lot done and feeling really productive and then your phone makes that little beep-boop-buzz sound that says “Hey you! Pay attention to me!” So you stop what you were doing and pick up your phone to see what your favorite screen decided was so important that it had to interrupt you.

“We’re celebrating February 21st with 21% off at Wingstop if you order in the next 21 minutes!”

What were you even doing again?

Editor’s Note: Hi there! This is the first newsletter I’ve posted since I told anyone aside from a few select readers that I was doing this, and I’ve been floored by the kind words, support, and general enthusiasm you all have sent my way. Thank you so, so much! I have a bit about what I have planned for the future at the end of the letter, but please don’t hesitate to send feedback, either by replying here or by dropping me a note on Bluesky.

The Story So Far

In the beginning of the smartphone age, the only software that was able to pop any notification on your device came from core OS or the handset manufacturer if you were on Android. It was a simpler time, but this was not a great solution, primarily because it locked us all into the core apps provided by the vendors. Messaging, calendars, to-do lists, and a whole host of other app categories were generally pretty useless without notifications.

When Apple and Google finally flipped on notifications for third-party app developers, they unleashed a Promethean technology on the world. Notifications opened up markets for an explosion of revolutionary apps—mobile software that revolutionized vast swaths of our digital lives—handling old tasks (calendaring, to-dos, email, etc) in new and exciting ways and creating a whole host of thrilling new apps that helped us with everything from fitness to breaking bad habits. It was truly a time of app miracles.

Given the benefit of hindsight, I’d even argue that building a centralized notification infrastructure for phones was one of those small features that ended up shifting the center of our digital worlds from the PC to the smartphone. Notifications let the under-powered phones of the time punch far above their weight.

But, as the saying goes, with great power, comes great responsibility. The new wave of app developers were making thoughtful decisions about when and how it was OK to interrupt their users responsibly and with minimal negative impact, but trouble was brewing.

At the same time, the CTOs of every consumer product company in the world were looking down the barrel of another expensive annual line item on their budgets devoted to building and supporting apps for these new devices, which at the time were owned by a relatively tiny number of (mostly) wealthy white people. They needed an app strategy, but were worried about pissing away a bazillion dollars on fad gadgets that were nothing more than Blackberries for soccer moms. And then someone popped up a chart that looked like this:

And that was the end of that.

The OS people knew that notification spam would be a problem, so they added app-level flags to the OS to give users an easy way to disable notifications for spammy apps. Any app that wanted to send notifications had to ask the user for permission, and for a while everything was OK. People said no to spammy apps, notifications got fancier, and there was balance.

But over the last 15 years, the notification spam outpaced the OS’s ability to manage it. Marketers realized that if they offered something people wanted—like delivery notifications—they’d say yes to their apps again. Then they could shovel a bunch of garbage notifications in with a few good notifications, and make it all nice and legal by burying the option to disable the spam deep in menus where reasonable people would never venture.

I’ve spent a lot of time curating my notifications, and it’s still a disaster. This is what a regular Tuesday looks like for me, after pruning out most of the marketing crap:

So How Do We Fix Notifications?

The good news is that this has been a problem for so long that the tools for dealing with it are actually pretty good. iOS and Android both give per-app, granular control over how notifications are presented, whether they’re persistent, and whether they make a noise or cause your phone to vibrate.

You’re about to use that control to turn notifications off. For almost everything.

It took me about 30 minutes to go to the Notifications page in iOS’s Settings app and turn the vast majority of notifications off. Yes, it’s the simple solution. Yes, it feels extreme. No, once you turn them off, you aren’t going to miss them. I promise, it’ll be OK.

Most of us don’t need to know when our in-transit package reached the Kansas City hub or when the takeout food we’re driving to the store to pick up is going to be ready. It’ll be ready (or not) whether the app notifies us (or not). All that all of these notifications do is add to our already high stress levels in the form of increased cognitive load. I don’t know about you, but I can do without the extra cortisol.

I went down my list and got rid of all of my e-commerce notifications, even Amazon. I turned off everything else except:

• My messaging apps - Signal, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and iMessage. If I ever work on a Teams team again, I’ll grudgingly turn it back on

• The two calendar apps I use - I love Fantastical and have a shared Google calendar that we use for the family

• My to-do list app - I like to use Reminders to pop—ummmm—reminders when I arrive at home or work, or when I’m in the car on the way home if I need to stop and grab something. And yes, I’m pretty basic here. Apple’s default Reminders app suits my needs

• My most important email address - The only one that gets permission to notify me is the low traffic address where I exclusively get contract work and other job offers

• The apps that perform useful life tasks - This is a catch-all category, mostly for zero-spam smart home stuff that I have full control over, navigation apps that tell me when I need to leave to get to my next appointment, and stuff like car-charging apps (which use notifications to help me know when I need to move my car once it’s done charging)

• Libby - Libby only pops notifications when an ebook I’ve checked out from the library is due or a hold I’ve placed is available. Libby seriously rips

• Safety stuff - Weather and QuakeAlert give me notifications for imminent bad/emergency weather and potentially devastating earthquakes, respectively

• Security apps - The rise of passkeys (more on passkeys in a future newsletter) means that I have a handful of sites that pop an app notification when I try to log into them

Everything else went—food apps, reservation apps, movie apps, car services, multiplayer games, streaming services. Everything. (OK, I kept Krispy Kreme. It made the cut because donuts rip and Krispy Kreme gives good discounts in notifications.)

Once I’d done the big cull, I went into the in-app settings for each app that survived and trimmed some more. I disabled all the non-essential notifications for those apps. This took a little longer, but after another 30 or 40 minutes I was done, with two notable exceptions.

Verizon doesn’t seem to differentiate between messages required for your account, like bill reminders, and marketing messages trying to get me to upgrade my phone. Add that to the list of reasons I’m switching phone providers shortly.

Because I work in games and run a large podcast community, I do a lot of work in Discord, so those notifications need to stay on. Discord doesn’t make it easy to limit notifications to DMs at a system level, so I full-mute every server when I join it.

I have 222 apps and games on my phone, and most of them were allowed to post some kind of notification before I started this process. Now there are just over 40 applications that have permission to interrupt me. While my daily number of notifications still varies based on the number of messages I’m getting on Slack/Signal/Discord, those are generally important and/or useful. And the number of spam messages that break my flow to no benefit has decreased dramatically. Notifications are useful again.

A Few More General Tips

The lack of notifications on your phone is going to feel weird at first. You have been trained to expect it to give you a list of potential ways to entertain yourself when you’re bored, so you’re going to have to make a conscious decision about what to do with your idle/bored time. I made a home screen with my ebook reader, my favorite publications, my music app, YouTube, and a couple of favorite games on a home screen to give me a handful of curated time-wasters to choose from.

Both iOS and Android provide powerful tools to let you customize the way your phone works based on your context. I’ve used iOS’s Focus mode to set up different notification profiles that are tied to my location and/or the time of day for work, family time, podcast recording, sleep, driving, and other activities. The Android tools weren’t as robust the last time I looked at them, but there are apps like Buzzkill that tie into the OS and give you similar functionality.

Notifications are designed to be transient, so using them as an auto-generating task list isn’t a good idea, even if it seems like it should be. It’s too easy to lose a notification to an errant swipe or OS wonkiness, which is the opposite of what you want from your task list.

Apple is trying to apply AI to this problem, but my experience with the early Apple Intelligence notification summaries has had mixed and often hilarious results. It provides quick summaries for chains of notifications from the same app, but it seems to have an equally difficult time extracting meaning from both casual Discord messages and business-oriented emails, and at this point I’m mostly leaving it on for comedy value. Your mileage may vary (hit the reply button and let me know if it’s working well for you!)

iOS also provides a quick interface for notification configuration on the lock screen, so you don’t have to tackle this problem all at once. You can triage them as they come in, by swiping left on them and selecting the Options button. That popup will give you deep links to the app’s notifications pane in Settings, the in-app Notifications page, and a variety of per-app snooze and perma-mute options for notifications.

When you install a new app or game, be thoughtful about whether to say “Yes” when it asks for permission to send you a notification. Does Chipotle really deserve the right to interrupt you when you’re spending time with your loved ones? No. Chipotle does not.

What’s Next?

This week, I’m assigning you some (strictly optional) homework. I want you to take a look at your average number of daily notifications. (In iOS, it’s in Settings > Screen Time > See All App & Website Activity at the bottom of the page.) Take a screenshot or make a note of that number and then trim your notifications some! You don’t have to be as aggressive as I was, but think about which apps deserve permission to interrupt you. After a few days, check back and let me know what your score is. You can reply to this letter or shoot me a message on Bluesky.

Since it’s the end of the letter, I want to reiterate how excited I am by the reaction to this project. Thanks to everyone for the support and kind words, you all have me very pumped up. I’ve been working on the concept and the articles for several months, and it’s really exciting to see that so many other people are feeling the same way I do about computers and the Internet. Also, I’m sorry you’re feeling the same way I do about tech.

Like I said on last week’s TechPod, I’d much rather work for readers than advertisers or other giant companies, but at the same time I also like keeping my family fed and housed, so I’m working on a paid component for the newsletter. I have a bunch of ideas (I hope you like ‘zines!), but if you have requests or suggestions for premium offers you’d like to see, please let me know! I’m hoping to have something to share with you for next week’s edition.

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