Ask HN: Notification Overload

I don't have email hooked to my phone directly. If I do need it, I fire up gmail in a browser.

I don't have twitter, facebook, or any of the other apps that came by default. If I need those, I fire up chrome and use the web interface.

One exception is Discord, for contacting my child, but it doesn't start by default, and all the notifications are off for it as well.

Only texts and actual phone calls alert me.

On Android you have stock Digital Wellbeing app.

You can limit many things such us:

Number of notifications per day, Notifications on given hours, nighttime, work time etc, Notifications by application(!), Number of minutes/hours allowed per application before it goes into blocked state till the next day, break or end of work, Priority of notifications, Daily summary of notifications etc etc.

It helped me to cut down mobile screen time from like to 40m.

PS2 : Install Brave browser - it blocks all ads, popups and cookie questions forever. AND it let's you play youtube in the background

If you want to remember dates, how about a calendar printed on paper? A filofax?

Generally these days, the best solution is one that doesn't involve computers and big tech.

I disable all notifications except for:

* SMS (and WhatsApp) for direct communications (disabled for an hour or two when seeking flow).

* Phone calls from family and close friends (filter disabled for a few hours when expecting an important call from elsewhere)

* Mentions and DMs on Slack (work hours only)

* Calendar

* Occasional temporary exceptions (Airbnb and airline apps during travel and a few days before/after; Taskrabbit the day before and day of a task; food delivery when expecting one, etc.)

Everything else I try to be notified of through email, which is easier to manage on a pull rather than push basis. I DO NOT allow email notifications. That’s begging for a deluge.

The default when an app or site asks to send me push notifications is a hard NO.

This volume of notifications is very manageable.

I'll suggest an approach that works for me.

Ask yourself what it is you're actually doing / attending to / accomplishing, with regard to whatever notification you happen to see. Then identify similar ones; group them together; and work on that group at repeated intervals. It should feel like boring maintenance work — because the goal is to make work predictable in order to predictably achieve the outcomes you desire (and then to automate the work, if you want, to free up your time). This also helps to identify low-value types of activities and then deprioritize or eliminate them.

By way of your example, I want to take certain actions regarding special days involving people who are important to me (birthdays, holidays, anniversaries …). So periodically I attend to that because it's important. (Maybe that means I plan things out every week, or every month — up to you. And then the planned tasks — calling my buddy, shopping for gifts, writing and mailing cards — go on the calendar as planned work.) It's during that work period that I see triggers / upcoming items related to that group of items. Why would I want notifications or other interruptions about them any other time? Answer: only for things that are true emergencies. Maybe you should have a yearly repeating 15-minute calendar entry to call your friend on their birthday. (You are working from your calendar, right?)

The other tip I can offer is to do yesterday's incoming work today, and today's incoming work tomorrow. This lets you strategically plan how you will handle all of today's work instead of getting interrupted by it today and bouncing around trying to deal with it. Moreover, very few things need to be done immediately; many problems solve themselves with time; and sleeping on things can shift a large chunk of the time-consuming processing involved with it to your subconscious mind. (Furthermore, the habit of planning your work in advance and addressing it methodically is going to drastically reduce the number of true emergencies and even typical interruptions that you'll feel the need to deal with. It's a virtuous cycle.)

I'll leave you with the notions that practically everything is unimportant when you consider its place in the incalculable vastness of the universe; you never get your time back; and your health is of paramount importance.

P.S.: I somehow missed that you had the birthday on your calendar. This tells me that either you're not working from your calendar (big problem) or else you added the birthday as an all-day event instead of an appointment ("I will call my friend on their birthday every year at 12 PM and catch up for 15 minutes").

The problem with limiting Slack to mentions is that it incentivizes colleagues to @-mention you just for visibility, which quickly defeats the purpose of the filter.

Use ThreadPatrol to automate thread enforcement, which keeps channel noise down and makes those selective notifications actually meaningful: https://thread-patrol.com

Turn off all notifications except SMS and phone. Change email to pull, not push. Delete all social media apps, use the phone browser for it. Remove all work applications from your phone. Either you’re working or you’re not, no in between where you get pulled in against your will (I have a work phone provided by my company, so it’s easier).

I did this 8 years ago and I can’t recall anything important that I have missed. I can still look at email/social media/whatever in the browser or I sit down at my tablet/laptop. I still have Spotify and YouTube on my phone, but I try to limit entertainment apps on it.

I made this open-source set of email filters. I've used it for years. The only email notifications I get are legit ones I need to know about.

https://unfuck.email

You have to start curating your attention and start treating it as a resource.

Stop using social media, which is a business model that is fighting for attention and cannot survive without it.

Smartphones are user hostile designs, use a laptop with KDE or GNOME on it. Both desktop environments allow to filter notifications to the point that you can decide what type of notifications are allowed to appear.

Always remember: every app that is free to use is paid for with your attention.

I just keep most of them disabled. I only keep mentions in Slack, DMs in Whatsapp, and that's about it.

I actively poll anything else.

>the deluge and cacophony of notifications, emails, texts and phone calls I imagine we are all getting inundated with everyday with increasing entropy and volume.

I don't think I experience this?

My general strategy is to disable all notifications for Android apps except messaging. Phone is always on silent, so I don't get random calls.

I definitely get a lot of crap emails though - so many where the company creates a new marketing list and subscribes you to it. You can unsubscribe from that one specifically but not future ones.

Dropbox did a particularly spammy thing recently. In the same week they emailed me to say I was running out of space and I needed to buy more, and then also they emailed to say I had space that I wasn't making the most of, and wouldn't I like to try these other features?

I basically just disable notifications for everything except apps that are useful and don't send promotional push notifications. It does mean that I need to "poll" for messages sent to my IG but if it's important I'll shift the conversation to another app.

I've always seen the main issue being people who "don't mind" or otherwise tolerate notifications because they're non-technical or don't realise how precious their attention is.

What are your top 5 apps that give you notifications? Seems strange to want less notifications but not know how to achieve this.

I don’t have this problem. Every notification is one I find useful. If I get a useless notification I immediately take action to prevent them from giving me more. I rarely go back and re-enable notifications

Disable everything. I pretty much only leave them on for one email address, text, Uber Eats and the WSJ/Bloomberg.

We use a perpetual calendar just for birthdays on our bathroom wall. It is or used to be common in Holland.

I don't have any recommendations for notifications, texts, or phone calls, but for email custom clients help a lot. I use extra.email, have heard good things about Superhuman etc as well, it lets me customize notification settings by narrow categories

In the early 2010s, especially as smartphones began to appear everywhere, I noticed that, along with the desktop, we now had another perpetual Disturber of Peace. One of the worst things turned out to be Notifications, something not under your control, that derails your chain of thoughts/works/routine. Ever since, I had kept every notification disabled by default.

The world is becoming increasingly low-trust; hence, the default is no longer to “allow,” but to filter through a “whitelist.”

Disable all Notifications by Default.[1] This is best done at the time of app installation. When asked to “Allow Notifications,” disable it right then and there. Of course, depending on your occupation and needs, a few critical notifications should be kept ON. This will be less than 10% of your app. More than 90% of the apps on your device have no reason to notify you of anything.

And here is a weird but interesting thing - disable battery percentages everywhere. Personally, not on the phone and neither on the Laptop; if it dies, it dies.

A simple passive notification that can keep you on your toes and stress you out the most - phone battery percentage indicator. We have become so obsessed with ‘juicing up’ our phones that our levels of happiness and relaxation decrease exponentially as the battery percentage drops.

Even in 2026, I hear people’s phones make a sound when a message/email arrives. If I follow that, my phone will sing all day long.

“Never be so dependent on technology that a notification is the only thing that brings you hope.”

Personally, I have a different take on birthdays and have conflicting views. So, I’m sorry about that.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...

Leave your phone on silent permanently, setup your emergency contacts like partner and kids to ring on silent, and turn off all notifications except email and SMS/WhatsApp. That’s the key to a simple life. You won’t miss anything important and that realization is the most freeing.

And yes to your PPPS. My plan is to live out my favorite childhood book The Alchemist in New Zealand while retracing the LOTR filming sites with a herd of sheep and a shepherds crook. One of the sheep will be fitted with solar panels and Starlink though, cause I just gotta have my Love After Lockup.

Edit: and to be clear it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. You can reenable notifications on a per app basis (and on Android per notification type I believe). You can turn them on for an app for a few days to see how intrusive their notifications are. Just make it a habit to turn them off at the drop of a hat with extreme prejudice. If you need stuff for work make rules and automations to turn stuff on and off based on triggers.

Send callers not in contact book to voicemail on ios

Don't enable anything you don't need. Use the OS-native priority modes; i.e. no Slack messages after 18:00, no general message notifications unless from specific contacts, disable web browser notifications universally etc. no notifications for unknown sources (seems to be an issue in some countries).

It also really depends on how you perceive the alerts on a device; some people have lots of feelings when they see a dot or a number on an icon, others might not care or give it any attention. If such things are a distraction for you, turn them off. Unless they give you value or have an important meaning, they are not worth your attention.

Depending on your hardware/software vendor, it might be capable of synchronisation between multiple devices so you don't end up getting notifications anyway, and it might have multiple profiles with time boxes, or location-aware or event-aware profiles. Some of them are self-learning (to various degrees of usefulness), but either way, reduce the device to what you need it for.

With time, I've been revoking the ability of more and more apps to deliver notifications. The vast majority of the notifications these days are just pointless ads anyway.

> I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings, but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing.

Therapy, counseling, or addiction treatment. You’re opting into this problem cyclically. Whether that qualifies as a proper addiction or not is irrelevant: until you seek professional therapy, you are unlikely to make further progress alone.

my phone is always on silent. i've drastically reduced what apps can send notifications over the years. new apps don't get notification permissions unless i know what i'm going to get.

If you’re like me and get inundated with spam texts from politicians begging for money, you can set up an app to filter texts from unknown contacts matching content patterns. I recently set up SpamHound but there are many options, and configured filters for the telltale begging signs like “text stop to quit”, “end2end”, and about 2 dozen other variants they come up with to sneak past these filters.

I would very much like the option to collect all the notifications that aren't a direct message from someone I know into a digest to be shown to me a couple times a day. It should be inconvenient to open the digest manually, but convenient to grant a short-term exception to an app.

I'm disappointed phone operating systems don't provide this and half suspect they don't want to because it would reduce engagement with the phone.