I have a plethora of chat apps, and they notify me incessantly. My in-laws are planning a get-together using Google Chat. I get a notification every time someone posts a message — a message that I don’t need to see while I’m working.
Same for marching band. There’s a parent group, and from time to time, it sees a fair amount of discussion. Most of the time, I don’t need to be notified of each and every message in the discussion.
I have a dozen GroupMe groups, iMessage conversations, Slack, Teams and a few others.
It’s hard to stay focused on the conversation, the work, the task at hand when there’s a deluge of distractions. It’s notification hell.
On the other hand, iPhone and Android empower users with a great deal of notification options to try to help tame the hydra at the app level, but it requires time and effort to configure, and it doesn’t really help when the thing I really need to configure is the notification settings for individual chat groups within an app.
Then there’s my Garmin watch. It doesn’t know anything about my iPhone notification customizations, so it shows everything, instantly. Every once in a while, it’s a good thing, but most of the time, it’s downright annoying, and I have to take off my watch, or turn off Bluetooth on my phone.
Why can’t more of my apps be like Slack or GroupMe? Slack allows me to configure quiet hours, mute channels, and so much more. When my desktop is receiving notifications, it doesn’t notify my phone — thank goodness.
GroupMe lets me mute individual groups and sub groups for 1 hour, 8 hours, 1 day, 5 days and always. This is a killer feature, one that Google needs to adopt in its chat app. Google chat lets me configure do-not-disturb for a duration, but it’s app-wide, not group specific. Apple also needs to learn from GroupMe and improve the temporary mute settings for iMessage.
It’s not just chat apps. It’s Google Photos where an algorithm wants to interrupt my day to tell me that it has memories to share, or iPhone wants to tell me how much screen time I used in the past week. Years ago, I disabled notifications completely for email, Facebook, MarcoPolo, and others. Some apps have been programmed to tell me, when I launch them, that I’ve disabled notifications, and that I should enable notifications. No thanks!
I use do-not-disturb on a frequent basis — when I’m at church, when I’m in a 1-on-1 meeting, and automatically when I’m driving. Maybe it’s anti-social, yet it gives me space to focus.
There are also times when I’ve forgotten my smartphone and left it behind. They were peaceful times, times when I was able to focus on the human beings next to me.
Maybe I need fewer apps, or I need to completely mute more apps. Maybe I need more tech-free zones (seems unlikely in today’s world). Maybe I need to disable notifications on my Garmin watch.
What is your solution?