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Perfectly Prune Your Notifications to Stop Your Phone from Constantly Bugging You
May 29th, 2012Top StoryPerfectly Prune Your Notifications to Stop Your Phone from Constantly Bugging YouBy Whitson Gordon
We've all experienced phantom vibrations before—that feeling that your phone is ringing when it really isn't. Psychology professor Larry Rosen says this could be a symptom of tech anxiety, and it's probably true—we've gotten to the point where every time our phone buzzes, we feel like we need to pull it out to see what just happened, even if we're so often disappointed by email newsletters, Facebook likes, and other notifications that aren't "need to know". This is annoying, but there's no need to turn off notifications altogether—all it takes is a little pruning. The process is a little different depending on whether you have an iPhone or Android device, but there's a lot you can do on both platforms to keep annoyances to a minimum while staying on top of what's really important. It takes a bit of setup, but you'll be much happier for it in the end. Here's what you need to do. Step One: Split Up Apps By ImportanceBefore we get into the settings, you should take a look at the apps on your device and decide which ones you really want to stay on top of. Generally, I split notifications up into three categories:
You may find that you have other categories or sub-categories, but this is a good skeleton on which to base your system. Next, it's time to delve into the settings. Step Two: Tweak Your Notification Settings for Each AppWith those categories in mind, we'll now come up with a system for which notification settings we'll apply to each category of apps. Here's how to do it on both the iPhone and Android. On the iPhone
Note that the "Sounds" slider in the notification center means sounds and vibrations—there's no way to separate your preferences for each in iOS. If you have sound notifications, you'll get vibrations as long as you have vibrations turned on in Settings > Sounds. On Android
Note that every app has different notification settings—some will have more than described above, and some will have less. You just have to make do with what you have. For example, if you don't have the option to keep sounds on and vibration off, you're probably better off turning them both off for unimportant notifications. Step Three: Give Each App Its Own Notification SoundIf you really want to make your life easy, you can give each app its own notification tone. That way, when you get a notification, you know exactly what kind of alert it is without even looking at your device. Here's how to do it. On iPhone
Unfortunately, you need to do a little more work to assign custom tones to non-Apple apps. We've discussed how to do this before, so we won't go into it here—just know that it's a little more work, and since a lot of apps come with their own separate tones anyway, it isn't always worth the trouble. For third party apps that just use Apple's default tri-tone sound, the only way to customize them is to jailbreak your phone and use an app like previously mentioned PushTone, which is a great way to customize your sounds all from one place. On Android
Other Tweaks to Further Customize Your NotificationsIf you really want to go the extra mile, there are a few extra tweaks you can make to make your notifications as unobtrusive to your life as possible. Here are some cool tricks for iOS and Android. On the iPhone
If you're jailbroken, we also like this handy little tweak called Reveal, which makes your notifications scrollable on the lock screen. That way, you can see an entire notification—whether it be a text message, email summary, or something else—without having to unlock your phone. It's simple, but can often save you from having to open up your phone, wait for your inbox to load, and read the message if there's something else you'd rather have your attention on. On Android
Update: A lot of you are noting in the comments that WhoIsIt no longer works on many phones, in which case we recommend checking out previously mentioned ViBe. It doesn't do quite as much, but will still let you customize vibration patterns for calls and text messages. We also like previously mentioned Notifier Pro for Android. It gives you iOS-like banner notifications across the top of your screen that are much easier to read than Android's defaults, which mean it's easier to see whether a specific notification is something you need to open up right now. You can also set it to re-send you unread notifications after a few minutes, which is great if you're the type of person that doesn't always feel your phone vibrating in your pocket (say, if you keep it in your backpack or purse). This is just the beginning of everything you can do—we could do a whole feature on customizing just your email notifications if we wanted to—but you should find that your phone is much less annoying after putting some of these ideas in place. Got any other cool apps or tweaks for controlling your notifications? Let us know about them in the comments.  |
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