Ask HN: Notification Overload

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.

>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.

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

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