What is constantly begging for your attention, and what gets your attention? Those pesky pop-ups, bells, and whistles to notify us of a new email, Facebook message or news article get our attention. Turning them off on your desktop, tablet and phone can save you time, brain processing power, and energy. The result is an increase in focus on your work and an increase in productivity. Facebook pop-ups, email alerts, Tweets, and Instant Messenger apps take your focus away from what you are working on for a split second. Even if you don’t give in to the urge to click on the notification or look at your phone, your brain has lost it’s thought process. Now, it takes time to switch back to your work. As a result, the notification has caused you to lose productivity and time.
How to disable notifications:
- Go into each individual app and turn off the notifications or change the setting. In many cases, you may want to leave “badges” as an alert of new items. (These do not pop-up on your phone but will show up in each app’s icon as a number in a red circle).
- You may need to keep some alerts like calendar appointment alerts.
- If you need to be alerted when a new email comes from someone important, iOS will allow you to select a few VIP’s! You can setup this feature by going into your Mail>Mailboxes>VIP and click “Add VIP”. Select the contacts you would like to make VIP’s. Then select “VIP Alerts” to select how you would like to receive notifications for emails received from these people only.
- Each individual app is listed here, and you can disable notifications off by toggling the Block option.
- You may need to keep some alerts like calendar appointment alerts.
- Also, you can long press on a notification to bring up a link to the notification page for that app via the “i” icon.
