Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m frustrated.
Why am I Frustrated?
I’m glad that you asked.
I’m frustrated because our productivity is being challenged at every turn.
One of the things that is bothering me the most these days is notifications.
I may be too much of a social butterfly and be signed up for too many social networks,
but really do they all need to notify me on all of my devices all of the time?
No, they don’t.
But it’s my responsibility to turn off those notifications, just like it’s your responsibility
to take control of your notifications.
So today, we are going to be looking at turning off notifications on all of your devices on
Ask DottoTech.
You’re constantly asking me for better ways to be more productive and this is in my mind,
kind of one of the keys is overcoming distraction.
Now there are a lot of ways that we have to overcome distractions, allowing us to concentrate
more effectively on what we’re doing but one thing that we can all do is turn off notifications.
Now perhaps you have such incredible self-discipline that seeing a notification appear on the top
right-hand corner of the screen or buzz on your phone does not bother you.
If so, good on you.
But for the rest of us, we need to find a way to deal with all of these notifications.
So let us dive in.
We’re going to show it to you on Mac, on Windows, on iPhone and on Android.
We are going to do a notification blitz today.
Let’s start on the Mac.
In the Mac, if you head into your systems preferences you’ll find the Notifications
setting there.
Now this tells us how to manage each of the notifications coming from our apps, which
is really where most of the problems come from and to be honest most of the problem
comes from just a few apps.
I’m talking to you, Facebook.
So here’s how we can manage it.
First of all, did you know that you have a Do Not Disturb?
You can actually set times that notifications will not appear by choosing the Do Not Disturb.
Plus, you can add at any point manually turn on Do Not Disturb just by clicking on the
notifications bar here and then if you scroll up—you see that it’s always hidden—but
if you scroll up then you can turn on the Do Not Disturb and that means nobody will
disturb you till the next day.
You can do that if you just want to temporarily disable everything but a more permanent solution
is probably called for.
In that case, go into the Notifications area here.
Go in and choose the offending notification and determine whether or not you actually
want to be notified on your computer at any one point.
Now there are three different types of notifications, at least Facebook has three different types.
You can turn it off completely, you can just allow for banners and you can allow for alerts.
They tell us what happens with each one.
None is of course none.
Banners are the ones that pop out and slide out from the side of your screen and alerts
basically are pop-ups that happen on the screen and usually interrupt your process.
You have to finish them off.
You have to click on the alert before you can move on.
So you can go through and understanding all of those alerts are happening, you can control
them all from the notification screen.
Awesome, Steve.
What’s up next?
Well, let’s talk about on our smartphone next, shall we, because on said smartphone
a lot of notification appear.
Now you get them in a lot of places.
Now people freak out when they look at my screen because I’ve got lots of badge notifications.
Those are the ones that tell you how many emails or how many messages are in each of
your different areas.
That doesn’t bother me.
If it bothers you, you’re going to want to turn them off as well but it doesn’t
bother me too much.
Now basically on iOS in order to get to all of the notifications, again just like in the
Mac they have a Notifications screen.
If we tap on that, you can see all of your different apps that are authorized for notifications.
Now you can avoid a lot of this problem when you initially install an app because they
all ask for permission to send you notifications.
Just say no.
It’s not that hard a thing to do.
No.
Try it yourself right now.
One, two, three.
See?
You can do it.
I knew you could but go through it.
Again, if you tap on any of these, let’s say Agora Pulse which I actually want to have
my notifications.
There we see a roster of all of the notifications, whether it will show in the notifications
center—By the way the notification center on the Mac is what we drag down from the top
and it gives us kind of all of the last messages that have been coming into our phone.
So it allows us to show in the notification center whether or not we want to have a beep
attached, the badge app icon which creates that little counter that attaches to the icon
of the application on the phone, which drives so many people crazy is there, and it basically
walks you through each of the different styles and notification you might have for that individual
app.
What’s my best recommendation?
Go through it and only have notifications for things that are absolutely essentially.
I would leave probably notifications on for texting, of course, phone calls.
You might want to leave it on for email and then you’re going to have to choose whether
or not you want it for Facebook and Messenger and all of those other apps.
But you can reduce the amount of distractedness that you get by turning it off.
So don’t complain that you’re constantly being distracted now that you know that you
can actually turn off said distracting things.
Now let’s have a quick look in the wonderful world of Windows.
If you go under your Settings, you’re going to find something quite similar.
You go into the Systems Settings and there we have Notifications and Actions and just
similar to what we find in iOS or the Mac operating system, you can see here that you
can see all of the different applications that are running.
I've got a very virgin install of Windows 10 running because I don’t use Windows a
lot.
But this is where you go in and you can actually turn on and off all the notifications for
the individual apps if I had any apps that were notifying me.
Windows 10 users, you can gain control as well.
Now I know what you’re asking.
Okay, you’ve covered iOS.
You’ve covered Apple.
You’ve covered Windows.
What about Android, Steve?
What about Android?
Let’s take a look at how we deal with notifications in Android.
Now on my Samsung phone, if I swipe down it brings me to the notifications area and here
I’ve got the gear icon which brings me into the settings.
This is the exact same as going into the settings through the main interface.
But in Settings, we find Sounds and Notifications.
That rings a bell, doesn’t it?
Scroll on down in Sounds and Notifications and there’s our Notifications choices.
We’re allowed to set it up for Do Not Disturb.
We can determine what we have on the lock screen and we also have App notifications
which—surprise, surprise—work almost identically to how they work in iOS that we showed you
just a few moments ago.
Any installed apps that have permission to give us notifications are listed out here
so we can go through it, we can take a look at the same app we were looking at in iOS,
Agora Pulse, and here we can turn on or off all the different notifications and we can
gain control over who is bothering us and when they were bothering us.
The bottom line with notifications is they will affect your productivity unless you have
some sort of colossal concentration and discipline where you simply don’t notice them.
Personally, I notice them so I need to turn them off on my different devices.
I’m like a magpie with a bright shiny object.
What’s up?
Oh, that looks more interesting than what I am working on at this point.
I hope you found this video to be useful.
Now I have to ask you a favor.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!