Ask HN: Notification Overload
7 hours ago
I'm looking for tools or methods to better curate 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.
The amount of "notifications" I get everyday is overwhelming to the point where I often decide to switch my phone to "silent", leave my phone in another room, and even turn it off for periods of time. The problem with this is that I miss important things and they often get buried.
I've spent hours and hours unsubscribing, deleting, uninstalling, toggling settings, but then I find myself reinstalling, resubscribing. It's just a mess, and exhausting to just think about.
The reason I'm writing this is partially to vent. I just realized that my closest friend's birthday was a few weeks ago. I had it in my calendar, but never saw the notification. Yes, I should be more organized and Yes, it's not the end of the world. but damnit, i get so much crap from this bionic appendage, and still I cant use this tool to help me with remembering important things.
It just seems like its getting worse every year.
Hopefully this is helpful to others.
P.S. can we please stop with the "would you like all or some cookies" popup on every friggin website?
P.P.S. can websites stop asking for permission to invade my OS?
P.P.P.S. does anyone else ever want to run away and be an off-grid hermit?
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 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.