Notifications are for what?

Sep 8, 2026 1 min read Communication, Collaboration, Technology

Allow me to promote my personal philosophy on notifications, those pesky bings and banners riddling our phones, a (non-AI) scourge of the modern era.

Notifications are for… drumroll … (In decreasing order of importance)

  1. yourself
    • calendar alerts
    • alarms and timers
    • reminders and todos
  2. close friends and family1
  3. special circumstances, such as
    • travel
    • waiting for a delivery
    • leading up to a grant deadline — time to throw open the barn doors

Not for other times. Not for email or other comms!2 Instead, block specific periods of the workday for email/communication (and feel free to set up a calendar alert reminding you it’s comms-time).

The key tenet is notifications are allowed only when you let them. The scourge comes from giving up that control.

  1. Depending on the person, such as your spouse or children, it’s obviously fair to prioritize them above (1). ↩︎

  2. With apologies to Knuth: Email (Slack/Teams/etc.) is great for keeping up on things; my job is to get to the bottom of things. ↩︎

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