783: Managing Notification Frustration
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Welcome to the Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks, as always joined by your pal and mine, Mr. Stephen Hackett. How you doing, Stephen? I'm good, David. How are you? Good, good. We have had this show on the outline for a little while. Today, we're going to be talking all about notifications, and I'm looking forward to this one. I'm hoping that we inspire you, dear listener, to take those notifications into hand.

Before we do, though, a little housekeeping. Today, as this show releases, there's one day left on the early release discount for the Productivity Field Guide, MPU10. No space. Gets you 10% off, but there's only one day left, guys. So do that. You know what? I'm going to leave it open for like two days, but don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody. All right.

So just in case, just in case you're listening to it on Monday, you still got one more day, but you don't have many days left. So, so get in there and get it if you want. Thanks everybody. Who's got it. I've already getting feedback from people going through it. And as I keep saying, this one is a big deal to me and the webinar series is about to launch. So if you bought the course, you're going to be getting emails and lots of stuff going on. And thanks again, everybody for the support on that. And today on more power users, we have an interesting topic.

Yeah, you've been spending some time with DeepSeek, a new large language model that has caused quite the uproar in just about every way you can count. So we're going to be talking about that.

Yeah, it's complicated, honestly. The AI engine out of China, lots of discussion around it. And I thought it would be something that would be fun to get your point of view on. And there's just a lot going on with that. So stick around for more power users. That's the ad-free extended version of the show. Stephen and I intend to go deep on DeepSeek. So why notifications? This is something that we all live with every day. Why has this been promoted to a full show?

Well, I mean, there are so many of them is the problem. You ask anybody and they're like, yeah, notifications. And the thing is, it's like the dripping water torture thing where one is okay, but before you know it, there's just so many of them. And there is a...

There's a spectrum here, which most people get to the logical conclusion of in that they just ignore all notifications. I think that's what happens. You know, the benefit of a notification, and there is a benefit, is it lets you know something important as soon as you need to know it. The downside, of course, is that Apple did such a good job on it. They made it so easy that every app developer feels like their app should be able to tap you on the shoulder anytime it wants to.

And there's this weird optimism you get when you get a new app. It says, hey, I want to give you notifications. And you're like, yes, of course. I just got you a little app and you're going to change my life. Go ahead and give me notifications. But then two hours later, you don't even remember the app and it's giving you notifications forever. It is a problem that grows out of control. I see it in the tech press even when people complain about devices. They're like, ah, too many notifications. It's not good.

But all of this stuff is in your control. Yeah. And Apple has done a good job lately of giving us controls and ways to kind of wrangle it. But it does take some effort on your behalf. I mean...

Yeah, I think that's I think that's all all right. And Apple, there was a time where they were not making good decisions around this. And we'll get to how some of those echoes kind of remain to today. But yeah, there are benefits, right? You can know that your kid got home safe or your boss can get a hold of you or tornadoes coming through your town.

But I agree with you. And since we've been playing this, I've just kind of been, sometimes I do this. I just sort of like quietly watch the people around me. And I think you're right. I think a lot of people get a bajillion notifications and none of them matter. And it's just background noise and they got badges everywhere and their lock screen notifications that are a full, and they're not really paying attention to them or managing them. You know, they may see if something comes in, it happens to be sort of the top of the list for the moment, but,

But I think there are a lot of people out there where this is sort of just a runaway train and they've kind of given up on it and you don't have to. This can be fixed. And really, I think it's an area worth spending some time in our setups to make these devices more useful and less distracting. Yeah. I mean, there's a health element to it. Interruptions are ruining us. And we see that in all sorts of ways with kids, with adults, etc.

Another kind of dark side of notifications is that notifications at the wrong time or at the inappropriate time can really kind of take the joy out of life. I was at recently at a, at a big event and I had a friend there who checked her, her notification on Sunday. Someone from work had sent her an email that had something troubling in it. And the, the big event was ruined for her because all she could think about was that thing. And,

And, you know, if she had been using focus modes and notification controls, she wouldn't have seen that till Monday morning. You know, let it ruin your Monday morning, not your Sunday afternoon. And this is all within our control.

And I know that very few people do this. You know, I this is always a subject of interest to me when I'm around people, even people who are super invested in their technology. Like, what are you doing to manage notifications? And I feel like there is this mentality that it's easier to ignore it than to address it.

And one of the themes of the show will be that that is an in, that is an untrue assumption. You can manage these really easy. Like you can manage it while you're sitting in your car waiting for the gas tank to fill up or whatever. And with a week or two of just little bits of time or maybe in a dedicated hour, you

you will have a notification system that serves you, not you serving it. And this is definitely an episode with an agenda. Yeah, yeah, it is. One way that I think Apple has made this easier to manage, and I cannot believe I'm getting ready to praise system settings on the Mac, but these work basically the same way across all of Apple's devices now. I mean, there were some like unique things to the iPhone, but

in general, like once you sort of understand the preferences you can set around these notifications, you can do that across your devices. And,

You have a point here that you really think people should plan this on a per device basis. And I hadn't really thought about that before. Like I have them set up differently, but I hadn't kind of that wasn't intentional. And I'd love to know what you're thinking is behind that. And we're going to talk about our strategy.

Our approach is later on, but why do you think people should have these, you know, maybe tuned differently on different things? Because these devices have different jobs, right? You know, the iPad is a good example. I use the iPad for, believe it or not, content creation. I like to write on it. There's some stuff I like to do on the iPad. But when I'm doing that kind of stuff, by and large, I don't want any interruptions. So...

My notification strategy on an iPad is way different than my notification strategy on my iPhone. I'm more liberal on the iPhone, just like the watch. If the watch is on, I have less that gets through to the watch than gets through to the iPhone. But the stuff that gets through the watch is super important. If my watch taps, I check it because...

you know, every time it's something that I want to know, it's a text from my wife or it's a, you know, it's like there's certain things that, that like break through the barrier. And I've set up my notifications in a way that allows that to happen. And I think if you start to think about that, um,

with respect to your Apple gear, what is the job to be done by this device? Then you can start coming up with what makes sense to allow it to notify me. You know, a notification is an interruption. You know, how liberal are you going to be with interruptions on your Mac versus your phone versus your watch versus your iPad?

versus your Vision Pro. Depending on what device you're using, you may have a different strategy. And just bringing some mindfulness to that and tuning your notifications to match the job to be done by that device, you get to a happy place where you can get the work done and the notifications aren't a problem. So think about it that way. No, that's great. And I definitely agree. I think that...

There are folks who I'm certainly guilty of this. I pay attention to this a lot on some devices and then on my iPad, like I just don't care because I don't use it very much. And it's basically always on do not disturb. But that's that works for me. Right. And you use your iPad differently. And we have listeners who I know for a fact use their iPad as their primary computer. And so it is going to vary from person to person.

Yeah, exactly. And the Apple plan kind of sucks here because they just want you to have all the notifications on all the device. They want to make it easy for you and the developer to have this relationship where they can interrupt you. Now, in fairness, Apple gives you a way to dial that back, but there really isn't like you have to throw switches to get a per device plan going. So that's not the default, which means probably 95% of the people are just getting hammered with

A lot of notifications. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of them out there, man. I mean, I think back to when notifications first came to the iPhone, you know, a hundred years ago and they were modal, which said they'd pop up in the middle of the screen. And initially that's all it was. Right. And then like, then you get badges and banners. We're going to talk about the different types in a minute, but this started out in such a simple way. And, um,

You know, rather famously, Apple had some rules around you can use notifications for this sorts of thing, but you can't use them for marketing. That's basically gone. You know, everyone, including Apple, uses notifications for marketing. And the floodgates have been open for a long time now. So, yeah, our job is to help shape that and make it more useful for people.

I'd love to know, because there are people at Apple that get this, like the existence of focus modes and the way you can tune notifications so simply. And we're going to explain in the show how you do it. There are people there who understand how important it is that you make this work for you instead of against you.

Um, I'd love to know where that starts. Like, is there like, is this like someone like is Craig Federighi like hung up on notifications or Tim, or is it like, is it like a gorilla team inside somewhere that is like making all this stuff happen someday? I'd love to know that the story behind that.

Although I'm probably the only one that cares, but it would be a good story for me. I bet Eddie Q has a lot of notifications. Oh, yeah. I feel like it's like a fire hose. And they're all like basketball scores. Yeah. Just every five minutes, right? He's like, okay, guys, we're going to do this multi-gazillion dollar contract. Oh, wait, let me get the score. Yeah, they traded who? Where were we? Yeah.

Yeah. But my, I'll tell you, uh, as someone at the end of this journey, my notifications matter to me. I look at them and I rarely get them. And,

And that's exactly how I want it. You know, we, we talked in a recent episode when we were talking about the, the AI summaries, how like the news thing was lost on me. I didn't, you know, there's all these news articles about how the summaries of the news items were bad. I had no idea because I never have a news apps and me notifications, you know? And so, uh,

That's just an example. But if you look at your notification feed and you see a bunch of garbage in there and one or two that you wish you had noticed, there you go. I think a good analogy here is like flags or due dates in a task system. If you have tasks or due date, if flagged or due date everything, then you don't read any of them. But if you just do a couple, they actually stand out. It's the same way with notifications.

Yeah. What's the line in the Incredibles? Like, if everyone's special, no one is? Yeah. That's how I view notifications. Like, yeah, I do not understand getting news notifications. That blows my mind. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. Go to ecamm.com slash MPU for a powerful live streaming platform for the Mac and get one month for free.

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So let's talk about some of the notification basics. And I think let's start with the types of notifications we can get from our Apple devices. Yeah.

It's a little tricky because they have made this everywhere, like iPhone, iPad, but also Mac, the big three, but also the Watch and Vision Pro. So this notification system is everywhere, and it has to kind of iterate a bit depending on the device. But broadly, the big one, I think probably the most intrusive one is the banners where it slides out right in front of your face. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, banners come in at the top or on the Mac from the right-hand side up in the corner. And they can be temporary or they can be permanent. And this is one area where Apple's language isn't consistent currently across the platforms. Some places, the permanent banners are called alerts. But basically, it means the banner stays there until you deal with it. And...

would be terrible for a news app, but it may be useful for your medications reminder or a task or something. And, um, and so that's called the banner style and you can, you can choose between them. I agree with you. I think out of all of these, the banners are the most intrusive because whatever you're doing on your device, it comes into your field of view, right? It's like, Oh, this thing has interrupted me. Whereas some

Some of the other things like just iterating a badge number or just going to the notification center, right? It's waiting for me. Banners like it's sort of the Kool-Aid man coming through the wall. Yeah. Yeah. And there's three different ways the banner show up. You can have it appear on your lock screen. You can have it appear on notification center. You can have it just slide in no matter where you are.

And all of those can be their own kind of separate circle of health, depending on how many you're getting. I remember one time I was, when I was a lawyer, we were in trial and I was negotiating with the, with the other lawyer, you know, sometimes in the middle trial things go, go poorly or really good. And you start saying, well, maybe we should settle. And so we're sitting there and the guy had his phone like on the table and

in front of me like he just had it face up i don't know why and so we're talking and his phone rings like it the banner notification comes up and the notification pops up on the lock screen and it's a text message from his client saying what a jackass i am whoa right in front of me you know and it's like looking at i just look down and i see it and he looks down

And he sees me looking at it. Like he turns red and I'm like, Hey man, it's okay. I'm opposing counsel. They're supposed to hate me. And we just laughed, you know, and moved on. But it's like this whole thing when it's on the lock screen that can get you in trouble. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's where you want the, the previews maybe turned off for some applications. Yes. So each of these areas, we talked about banners themselves being permanent or temporary and

On the lock screen, you've got kind of even more options. You can have previews always on, or you can have previews when your device is unlocked. And that one in particular, like the lock to unlock status of the phone, I think is a little bit trickier in the Face ID era. But in that case, like your phone's just upright on the table and you haven't looked at it in a while.

It means someone could see the text or just see that a message came in. Or you can have previews turned off entirely. Now, for me, I work by myself. I'm just at home. So I have previews on for everything. Like, I'm not in that situation where someone could eventually see something they shouldn't. But...

For certain types of apps, and this is a per app setting, it actually may be really good to have previews turned off, like maybe on your work email or, you know, or maybe in messages if you use that to talk to your clients.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And so I think it's a mixed bag here from Apple because they give you the ability to make all those decisions. Like, is it going to be in the notification center? Is it going to be on the lock screen? And this is on a per app basis, which is really the only way to control this stuff, right? Because...

There's no way to do this without making it fiddly if you want to give the user granular controls. And there's plenty of stuff that Apple's made and still makes where they have made the decision to not be fiddly and just not give you the control. But that's not true with notifications. They've opened up the candy store. You can make it as custom as you want.

but you need to kind of get your head around what those banners can do. I do think they're very intrusive. So you have to, I think you have to really make sure something earns its way on another one. That's like that. And it's just a checkbox in the notification setting. I guess I should back up for a second, go into the settings app and click notifications. That's where all this starts. And if you're, if you're improving this,

make it a habit for a week or two to go through and spend your free time instead of doom scrolling the news, go and fix your notifications. Right. But there was just a little switch that it says badges, you know, and what the badges is a little red circle. And what you don't want is to open up your phone and have badges on everything. It just gives you tension. And it's them yelling at you when you maybe not don't need it. Like that's another thing where you have to be really careful. I turn badges off on almost everything.

Same. Yeah. By my count, there are 15 toggles per application or 15 options. It's a lot of stuff, but it's got to be fiddly. I want this to be fiddly, right? Because I want to have these things exactly the way I want them. One interesting addition, this was an addition a few years ago, speaking of the lock screen is.

is you can change the appearance of these notifications on the lock screen where you can have, you can basically have them all in a list.

Or you can have them kind of stacked up kind of at the bottom of the lock screen, and then it's up to you to kind of scroll through them. Or you can just have a count and just you get a little line of text that says like four notifications. The list is the most intrusive, but kind of the least interaction necessary to.

to read them but i tend to lean towards stack i think that one kind of works for me the most recent one is there and i guess you'll get to see my my family on the lock screen yeah i stack them too and but again i don't get very many of them so it's fine yeah like one of the the the the moves to start with if you're on this journey is

is just the big button, you know, allow notifications, right? If you go through the notifications tab for each app that wants notifications permission, you've got a listing of every app on your, on your device. And it's kind of always remarkable to me to scroll through this and see that all the apps that are trying to have a notifications integration. And like, it's just crazy. Some of them don't really seem like they should.

Um, but there is, if you tap on it, the very first button at the top is just say, allow notification. So you can throw that off and it automatically turns everything off and then you will never get notified by that app again. And I think a healthy first pass at this is just to go through the entire list and turn off notifications.

on a per device basis, all the apps that you don't want to give you notifications. And if you haven't been weeding this garden, you'll see that almost all of them have some sort of notification they're currently throwing at you. I had quite a few that I ended up turning off in preparation for this.

Yeah, I find ones too. And there are developers who are like kind of team players about this. They have notifications, but they don't abuse it, but they still have access. And I see a bunch of apps in here that I've tested over the years that I've downloaded my devices and they have notification permission that I've not turned off, but I haven't seen a notification from them in ages because I haven't really used the app. So it's not like they're just throwing a bunch of junk at me, but I think the right move there is still to turn it off, you know, just, you know,

Turn off as many as you can. I almost wish from the screen we could say, not only turn it off, but delete this app. Like, this is just for me, like an old app that I don't use anymore. Rather than making me go hunt it down, let me push a button here and just nuke it from space. Yeah. The general rule is the bigger the company, the more notifications they send. Right? Like, indie developers generally are pretty respectful about this sort of thing. And, you know, Amazon may not be.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's a big off. Like Amazon's a great one. Even if you buy stuff from them, do not let them interrupt you because your battery showed up, you know? Yeah, they'll be on my front porch. It's fine. The newest place notifications show up is the dynamic island slash live activities. And we put this here. I actually really, like I saw you put this in here before I did. And yeah,

I looked at this bullet point for like five minutes is like, are these actually notifications? And I came down to yes, but they're also at least can be sort of a replacement for notifications. But it's another way that applications can surface data to you on your lock screen. Yeah. Yeah. And this was a stretch, but like to me, this is generally a good implementation because

Because you actively turn on dynamic island support in the application. I don't know that I'm aware of any app that does it automatically. I'm not sure you can. Yeah, somebody's going to write me and tell me there's one. But my experience has been they only show up in the dynamic islands because I positively told it in the app it can do that. Yeah, I think apps have to ask permission for it. But don't quote me.

Yeah. And they have to ask permission for notifications too. But once you say yes to notifications, then they kind of choose how far down the rabbit hole they go with all those settings and all the places banners appear. And that really gets you in trouble. So we've talked about where they show up. We've talked some about the basics of customization. But there are some more advanced settings in here.

I think time sensitive notifications and critical alerts in particular can be a little confusing. So I actually just I actually went on my phone and I wrote down what Apple says about them. So time sensitive notifications, that's an option you can enable. They are always delivered immediately. So they don't go to the scheduled summary, which we'll talk about in a minute.

And they remain on your lock screen for an hour. So they're kind of like temporarily sticky, if you will. But then critical alerts always appear on the lock screen and they play a sound regardless of the phone's focus mode or if the iPhone is muted or not.

Uh, so for me, the only critical alerts I have are certain types of like weather warnings in my area. Like if, if I'm under a tornado, uh, yeah, watch a warning. I want to know. Um, but also I have, uh, water sensors and home kit under my sinks.

And if one of those goes off, I want my phone to make noise. Like that is a all hands on deck situation. If I have water in my house where it's not supposed to be, especially living in a house that's like 80 years old now. And so those are the only two for me. So these things are kind of related. They're both are sort of options kind of above and beyond the regular notification type. But I do think they're a little confusing to people sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah. And, but the fact that you have those on means that you will catch it when you have a water leak. Yeah. You know, and as opposed to if you had 15 amps getting the, those notifications, you probably wouldn't. So, you know, this is, this is the line we're trying to walk. You know, I'm not saying you turn off all notifications on your phone.

Um, although maybe that makes sense on like a certain device that you don't ever want to be notified on, but, but the, uh, I think that, you know, the happy medium here is finding the stuff that you really care about. What is it that I'm willing to have my phone tap me on the shoulder when I'm in the middle of something important? Yeah. Yeah.

I mentioned the scheduled summary. This is also a relatively new feature in iOS as of a few years ago. And it acts like kind of like as a dam and the notifications kind of build up behind the summary and then they're delivered all at once. And you can set times for these summaries to show up.

You can also say, I want to see the upcoming summary, like collect them on the lock screen or don't do that. And it's very easy to add apps in and out of the scheduled summary. And I'm a big user of scheduled summaries. I really like this. Yeah, it's like kind of the middle point where like you don't want to be interrupted at the moment, but you are willing to like check once a day on this thing. A good use for this for me is like Parcel. Yes. Parcel is my delivery app.

I don't want it to tell me when the thing got put on a FedEx truck. But at the end of the day, I don't mind going through a list of any delivery notifications type stuff that came in during the day. And that's kind of what you think about. Stuff that's not critical, but stuff you'd like to check on. It's a way to save you the trouble of going to the app. And it's a very useful feature, so long as you're mindful about the way you implement it. Yeah.

Announce notifications. So that's a feature where you can have it talk out loud.

I don't have that turned on for anything. No, I do not either. It comes in like via your AirPods or something. And all of a sudden, you know, listen to a podcast on a walk and all of a sudden it's like for messages, David Sparks sent a picture of a small green character, right? And it's, you sent me a Yoda picture. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have these on. I think it's really cool that they're here. And I think from an accessibility standpoint, they're really important, but they're not for me. Yeah.

That's all. I totally agree. I think all this stuff serves a purpose. My agenda here isn't to say that these notifications shouldn't exist, but that we as users need to be the adults in the room in terms of what we get. Yeah.

And then a related piece of this. And we recently did a show where we went deep on our focus modes, but underlying all of that is notification management, because I would recommend if you didn't, if you missed that episode, it was just two, three weeks ago now, um,

The, uh, we, we talk at length about what we're doing in focus modes, but focus modes are notification management. I mean, right now I am in my podcast focus mode and the only three people that can break through to me are Stephen Hackett, Mike Schmitz and Daisy Sparks, you know, and, and

And that is because I'm doing that. And so there are no notifications coming through while I'm recording. And I like that, you know, and so you can do that too. Like I, I advocated the beginning of the show, a per device notification system, but I would go deeper and say a per context notification system. So when you're like just chilling and relaxing, you're,

You may let more notifications do than when you're in the middle of doing deep work. And you can do that with a focus mode, kind of combining these two episodes. I mean, there's a reason why this show came after the focus mode show, because I think you've got to get the focus modes nailed. And then you work on the notifications before you know it.

your device works great. I mean, I see so many people now saying, well, I'm going to buy this intentionally dumb phone that only does certain features and has a bad camera or no camera. I'm like, you don't need to do that, right? All you have to do is fix your focus modes, your notifications, and your iPhone is going to be perfectly fine. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Um, totally agreed. The, uh,

The last sort of advanced type of notification or option is the newest. It's Apple intelligence summaries. We spoke about this last week when we viewed Apple intelligence. That's which is off for me. I don't I don't need Apple intelligence.

Telling me what it thinks my wife said. Sorry. Sorry, Apple. It's probably a good idea at this point. I mean, maybe it gets better. As I said last week, I leave it on because I think it's kind of fun to read what the robot thinks. It brings me a tiny bit of joy. And it is often wrong. But that's the kind of thing as a nerd that I kind of just like intellectually to see, well, how did it get there? Yeah.

And it reminds me that the end of all humankind is not inevitable when I see how stupid Apple intelligence sometimes is. I don't think it's in the running to take over the world. That's what we're saying. No, this is not. We're not going to be making any Terminators. I think we're okay. No. They'd be very colorful, though, with Apple's gradient artwork. Really, the design work's the best part of Apple intelligence. Back, I'll be, maybe. Yeah.

We mentioned the Apple watch earlier and it's kind of worth its own sort of sidebar. Apple's default here is really bad where it mirrors what the phone does. I really believe in what you said of like the phone for me. It also was like a bit broader, but if my watch taps my wrist, I know it's important. And yeah,

I have taken the time to go through and this is done on the watch app on the iPhone. So it's separate from settings notifications. It's in the Apple Watch app. And you can go in there and turn notifications off for applications that you don't need them on your wrist. And that, I think, if you're frustrated by your notifications and you wear an Apple Watch, start, I think, with the Apple Watch because that's where...

in my mind, the notifications are the most intrusive. There is an angle to be set of like, well, you can just kind of glance at your wrist. If you're looking at your wrist every 90 seconds because CNN is telling you something, you've flown too close to the sun, I think. And it's really easy going there and you can flip them off. And it really makes the Apple Watch a more livable experience. Yeah, I mean, I'll just tip my hand a little bit. My system is...

I'm more inclusive on the phone than I am on the watch, but that may not be your system. Like I know Mike Hurley used to do this. I haven't talked to him about it in years, but he used to give all notifications to the watch and none to the phone. So madness, you know, does he still do that? I don't know. I think he's, I think he's changed his tune on that. Yeah. But like, that could be you like, like if you're a doctor, you're,

And your phone is in a locker somewhere, right? And you've got your watch on all day. And that is like your thing. That's how you interact with the world. I've heard from doctor listeners who told me that that's what they do. So you may have a completely different strategy. So the whole point is figure out what the job of each device is and then set them accordingly. But this whole thing about mirroring, which is the default on the Apple Watch, I think is...

I kind of understand why they did it, but I think it's the road to madness. You do not want to just automatically get everything on your wrist that you can get on your phone. Yeah. So, you know, be intentional about it. Agreed. And the way notifications are on a watch are weird, right? Because you've got something touching your body, whereas your phone normally isn't.

Yeah. Yeah. It can play sound. And I know some people keep the sound on their watch. I personally don't. But that is an option for you as well. I have to admit, Stephen, I like the sound on the watch. The sound design is good. I just don't want to hear it. Yeah. And that's the problem. I like the sound. So I turn it on about every six months. And after like two days, I turn it off. Mm-hmm.

Like, I love when I start a workout and it does the Olympic, you know, beep, you know, the beeping like the Olympic scheme, you know, and like, it's great. You know, it sounds good, but honestly, it probably shouldn't make any noise. You know, I'm going to turn it on again when we finish today. That's the other problem is I record. So it's like, yeah, you really shouldn't have it making noises when you're recording podcasts. But yeah, I like this. Yeah.

Okay. Anyway, sorry. Oh, one strength of Apple watch notifications is quick, quick replying. And you can do that from the lock screen on your phone or even banners on the Mac and some applications. Yeah.

But if a message comes in my watch, you know, I can tap on it and I can dictate. I can use quick replies. I can do this YP keyboard thing, which I have mixed luck with personally for those fast sort of dashed off replies. I do think the Apple Watch is good for that.

Yeah, I agree. And, uh, and the dictation's good. And I, I mean, like I said earlier, the, when the watch goes off, it's usually something I need to reply to or information I really need. And that, that's my strategy. We'll get to them later. Um, what do you think overall with notifications? How's Apple doing? I mean, I feel like their original sin is

Just answer my question. I feel like the original sin is making it so easy for people to throw so many notifications at us. I, you know, I see how that, that happens, but the default is if you're not,

If you're not, you know, weeding the garden, you're going to be getting a lot of notifications. What I do think they do that saves them is they make it so easy to go in and change these settings. Like I said, just go into the settings or even just go into the notification view on your phone or iPad and swipe it.

There's an options button. There's an ignore button. So you can actually change notification settings right from the actual notification, which I should have mentioned earlier. So they do a really good job of giving you the tools to go down and shut a bunch of this stuff down. But I do wish that it was a little harder to get them started.

But they require user consent. What more would I, you know, if I was in charge, what more would you do, Stephen? Yeah, I think Apple's kind of stuck with that. And

I do really like the ability to manage them from the lock screen. You can even do custom things like, hey, just mute this thread in messages for an hour or something, right? If the family thread's popping off and you're busy. I think all that's good. And while there are a lot of switches, I'm glad for all of them because I want to treat different apps in different ways. So I actually don't have a lot of complaints about where Apple is with notifications. I think given...

The world that we're in, they've done basically the best they can. I have an idea. Okay. Okay, so what if you had notification categories? Like a delivery app, one category is notification of item shipping. So when you submit your app, you give a list of the categories of notifications you do.

And if you do something like send me notification when there's an update to the app, which some apps do, even though I understand they're not supposed to,

But when it gives me the original confirmation to say, do you want notifications? Underneath it lists each category of notification that this app does. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, let me know what I'm getting into. Because that confirmation dialogue just says, can I give you notifications? I'm like, well, if you're giving me like one every two or three weeks, you can. But if you're giving me six a day, you can't.

And maybe if it gave you a list of the categories of notifications it sends, that allowed me to make a more informed decision when I approve it. Yeah, I like that. I also like that Apple has given us ways to get information online.

Without notifications. We mentioned live activities earlier. And the example for me is a live activity to follow a sports game instead of having a push notification every five minutes with the score or every time a touchdown is thrown, right? It's like, oh, I have a live activity. I can glance at my lock screen or in the dynamic Island if I'm using my phone and, and see what's going on there. I think that's an excellent addition and widgets. I mean, having widgets be able to show you information and,

and be updated on a regular basis without actually sending you a notification is great. You know, instead of having, you know, now I do have live activities on for like rain, for carrot weather, but I could just look at the widget instead of getting a notification or a live activity. So being able to

Have information that I want to be up to date, but I don't want my phone to vibrate or my watch to tap me. I like that there are now these alternative ways to get to that data. And I in particular am a huge live activities fan. I really have come to love them.

Yeah, me too. And the widget point is like really good. If you use that left, you know, when you swipe to the left, they call that the... The today view. The today view. You know, put some widgets there for apps that you frequently want to check. Like a good example, going back to deliveries, you could have no scheduled summary from Parcel, but you could just have the Parcel widget

On that today view. So in order to see it, you have to mindfully swipe over to it and scroll down to it. And, and that's another excellent way to do that and, and get yourself a few less notifications. Yeah. Overall, I feel like Apple has done as good as you can with this situation, except the climate and the environment of notifications just leads itself to kind of abuse the

And then it's just one more thing in the way of using your device that you don't even read. Yeah. And I really believe that is a problem for even like, you know, often on this show, I'll say this isn't something that Mac power users have a problem with, but I think there's plenty of power users that, that aren't weeding the garden. Yeah. And, you know, and thinking about this, I was thinking about how Android does it. And one distinct difference between the two that there's a lot of overlap now between the way Android and iOS do notifications is

Because Android can put app icons like up in the menu bar like you can on the Mac or like in the the taskbar on Windows. And I am glad Apple hasn't gone that route. I get it. Like you could just glance up there and like see how many emails you have or something. But I don't I think Apple's given us enough enough other places to.

to display that information. And the menu bar is obviously like a very precious real estate. I mean, on the iPhone with the dynamic Island, you know, like you got to go into control center even to see everything that's in there. So I know there have been times where, you know, honestly, there's been a lot of time that Android has been ahead of Apple here, but I think it's basically reached parody at this point.

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Go to 1password.com slash MPU to learn more and to sign up for a free 30-day trial. When you sign up, you'll get 20% off. Once again, that's 1password.com slash MPU. Okay, so we've talked through it. We've talked through the mechanics of it. Let's talk about what we're doing for notifications and how we keep them under control.

I think the biggest thing, something that you mentioned earlier, is having a notification audit. Every once in a while, opening up notifications on your devices and seeing what can send you things. Sometimes I may have downloaded an app for a trip or for a specific period of time, and I don't need those notifications anymore. They kind of just become background noise sometimes.

But I think doing that on some sort of schedule, some sort of regular basis across your devices is like step one, like spending some time and actually looking at what's going on. Yeah, I used to have this on a 12 month repeat in OmniFocus. And a couple of years ago, I changed it to three months. So I do it quarterly.

And all it does is it just shows up, you know, audit notifications. And it's not like a drop everything task. But like I said, it's a good background task. We all have moments of downtime in our life. And sometimes we want to distract ourselves with the phones. Wouldn't it be kind of fun to use that time you normally use to be distracted to turn off distractions? If you get me right, you know? Yeah.

It's like, it's like, you know, going against the man and, uh, you know, do that. It's not that hard. Like I said, uh, the, the, what I, what I do personally is like I said earlier, I opened the notifications, um,

a tab on each device. And I just go through and look at the, for any of them that have it turned on, like, cause there's always whatever I've installed in the last three months, there's a bunch that have notifications enabled for which they shouldn't have notifications enabled. I just go and turn them off there. I do also use as an excuse to delete kind of cruft apps that have added to my device that I'm definitely not going to be using anymore. But then for the ones that are coming through, if I feel like they're hitting me too often, I,

I address those like kind of from the notification screen. I look to see like, like a good one for me was I have been doing more Substack reading and I left notifications on at the beginning just to kind of see, but very quickly I realized that Substack is an abuser of notifications. Like I'm getting, um,

notifications just because so-and-so published a new story. And that's not what you don't want your magazine across the room yelling at you. Hey, I got a new article, right? You know, you just want to have the magazine when you open it there. So like I, I disabled all of that.

But, you know, then there's other apps where I have, you know, I'll move them maybe to the scheduled summary. You know, you just go through and make your decision on a per app basis. Does this get any notification? If it does, how far does it get to interrupt me? And it honestly doesn't take long. And that's particularly because I do it every three months. But if you just did it for the first time, I think in an hour, you would have it all done. And

And then suddenly your notifications would matter. But the trick is to do it on a per app device basis. You know, it's good to do it on your phone, but you got to do it on your Mac and your iPad too, and your watch, and you can really get the whole system down for you. And if you, if you weed the garden off and I'm torturing that thing today, but if you, if you go in and you do it on a regular basis, you'll, you'll be much happier and the notifications will matter. Yeah.

I think kind of hand in hand with this is like treating the devices differently, like we said. And for me, it's yet what do I want to see? But for me, it's really about context, right? Like if I'm at my Mac, like where I do my job, like my notifications are more tuned towards work type things, right?

And my phone is less so my iPad is even less so, but focus modes can also shore that up. But I really think that context is a, is a really good way, a really good lens to look at this through. And so for me, like on, on the Mac, part of that context is banners work a little bit differently than they do on the phone or on the phone there. I find them much more intrusive on the Mac, a little bit less. So I'm on a big display. It's just up in the corner and,

But the flip side of that is notification center is really bad on the Mac and maybe more useful on the iPhone or iPad. So like all of those things need to be taken into account. But the biggest thing for me is what types of things am I usually doing on this device and what can be helpful for that and what can be distracting for that.

Yeah, and it really isn't that difficult once you have that decision. So for me, like you, the Mac is where I work. And I think of all my Apple devices, it's probably the one I spend the most time in front of. Yeah, same. I'm certain it is. And the notifications are more liberal as to work, but they're less intrusive, which is kind of the same thing you said. And I will swipe in to check them on occasion.

And it's fine. In fact, I think that's probably where I'm most liberal with stuff like this. The next would be the phone. I let more through into the phone, but I am an aggressive user of scheduled summary. So to me, the, uh, a notification, an independent notification, uh,

on the phone, my first question is, why are you here? You know, and you constantly have to prove your value to me like, okay, this was worth me stopping to read it. And if it isn't, I immediately move it into schedule summary or kill it completely. And you can do that right on the phone, you swipe over hit options takes you right in. And you can you can manage it right there.

Now the, the watches I've been indicating throughout the show is to me, like only the best stuff gets through, you know, messages from my wife and like, like, you know, we have, um, you know, wildfire apps and earthquake apps. There's like, there are things like safety involved. Right. Um, I do an exception for me is airline apps. I let all airline apps go through to the watch because often I'm in an airport. Yeah. Well, you know,

I mean, I don't travel that much, but when I do, I like to make it easy for me. But I can go through, and I keep saying this, I'm sorry, gang, but it's just not that hard to go through and just go through that list and make a quick change. It's not as obvious with the watch, I think, because it's in the watch app, not in the notifications app.

You know, the watch app is essentially like its own settings app and you got to go find the notifications tab. It also doesn't tell you which apps have notification privileges from a glance. You have to tap into each one of them, but just do this and your watch will be so much more useful to you. And vision pro, uh,

It's like a watch to me. I don't have hardly anything allowed to introduce, interrupt me while I'm on vision pro. Cause I'm either writing or watching a movie. Those are the two things I largely do in there. And neither of which I really want any interruptions for. Yeah. I think on vision pro, I think basically the only thing I allow or like is like FaceTime, you know, someone's trying to call me. Okay. That's probably important. But, um, the, uh, the, uh,

schedule summary thing I'm also a huge user of I actually have I have it fire off basically every four hours and I don't see the next summary that is an option where like if you scroll down it's kind of building them up at the bottom of the lock screen I have that off and it is super easy to add things to it I've got a ton of stuff in here a lot of it as I went through my list was

uh, things that I need for like my kids, like the application, the school system uses to show their grades or, you know, if it, if there's like homework assignment or something like I should be aware of those, but I don't need them interrupting me. And, uh, so it's, it's a lot of that sort of stuff. And I find it really useful. This was something that I turned on when it came out and it's been on, I think ever since.

What's really eye-opening is if you go to settings, notifications, scheduled summary, there's an apps and summary section, and you can sort it by how many notifications you get from each app in the course of a week. And that can be really eye-opening. It's like, oh, I'm getting how many hundreds of notifications from this app in a week? Like,

honestly can be a little bit startling and maybe that's okay maybe you want a notification every time someone's at your front door but maybe you don't need that maybe you don't need those 400 or whatever it is a week yeah and then the other thing i do is there are categories of apps that i am just 100 against like i had to install the target app for reasons oh i just had to do it too yeah

okay can i go down a rabbit hole for a second please please all right so i'm i'm you know i'm i'm a work home dad right yeah so sometimes i gotta take care of stuff for people gotta pick stuff up yeah target parking lot pickup it's it's awesome you just drive there and they bring it and they throw it in your window and then they run away dude they have a carplay app

It's wild. They do? Yeah. I didn't know that. But my wife is like, she does not understand. She's like, you don't go in? Like she wants to go in and look at every aisle. And I'm like, I want to be there for two minutes. Yeah. You know? Yeah. But anyway, sorry. But I installed the app and they're like, hey, we're going to see your notifications, okay? I'm like, no, it's not okay. I don't ever want to hear from you, Target. You know?

I give you money and you give me things. And that's the extent of our relationship. And so like any sort of retail app, no, any sort of news app. No, like I am like a hard no on a lot of this stuff. And people say, well, what about the news? You need to know what's going on in the world. You know what you do at the end of the day, you pick a website or a new service you trust and you go and you check in at the end of the day and then you'll leave it at that.

You know, I mean, just like, I don't need all this stuff buzzing me all the time. Like I got to get work done. So, so I'm really a militant about it, but there are certain categories of apps that I just refuse. Yeah. And it's always shocking to me, like these apps that like, why does target need to send me a notification? You know, I don't get it, you know? Yeah. I'm going to put the Carvelay thing in the show notes. Cause it's, it's actually, it's,

It's actually pretty cool. I may try that. Yeah, because I, too, work at Home Dad. I do our grocery shopping. I do a lot of stuff, and it's awesome. I just hit the button on my truck and then go pick up the stuff. But I basically agree with you. My rules are very similar. And...

I've got some on that I only have on because of what I do. I would not have overcast notifications on if I didn't run a podcast company. So I've got those on. But it is really... Once you get into it, Apple has really given us a lot of control here. And I think that's good. I think people just got to make decisions, right? And

One thing we didn't really touch on, I tried like several different ways to like shoehorn this into the outline. I just couldn't. So I'm just going to do it here.

There's a whole world of in-app settings as well. So for instance, mail VIP, right? Like I can have just notifications for my VIPs in mail. David Sparks, you are one of them. I know you're very happy about that. Yeah. If you ever change that, don't tell me because my heart will literally break. It's like you, Mike Hurley, my wife, and I think like one other person. Okay, good. Very small. I'm ahead of Mike, right? Well, I mean, it sorts alphabetically. So yes. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah.

Sure. I think all VIPs are equal. But, you know, Slack, Teams, Discord, the New York Times, like lots of apps have buried in their own settings things to manage notifications. You were talking about like, well, could a delivery app tell me about this sort of delivery but not this? Some news apps have that. Now, I'm in agreement with you that I don't want or need news notifications at all. So I kind of chop it off at the top level.

But if there are apps where you have a sense of like, some of these notifications are good and I want them, but some of them are just noise. A lot of apps do have their own sort of subsystem of notifications and it can be worth spending some time tapping through those apps and seeing what they offer because a lot of these more complex apps have kind of built out their own sort of worlds within them.

Yeah. Yeah. And you can, you know, you get some granular control, conscientious developers make ways. I mean, this is not a thing where like all the developers are just trying to like take all your attention away from,

I know personally many developers who are very careful about the way they implement these features. But it just adds up. The problem isn't the one drip. It's the flood that inevitably arrives. So it's up to you to go in and make those choices. So my general philosophy is liberal on the Mac...

A lot of scheduled summary and pretty conservative on the iPhone and then really conservative on the watch and, and the vision pro again, very conservative about what I let through. When I say very conservative, it's emergency stuff, stuff that would require me to stop and do something. Yeah. There are no like informational items that come through to my watch or to my vision pro. It's like, it's only something that's like, Oh,

My wife has a flat tire. I need to go help her. You know, that kind of thing, you know, where, um, and even then I'm not that great at notifications because we just had a family member over the weekend saying, Hey, can I, let's use my emergency contact. And my wife said, no, make it me. Cause he never reads his phone. Yeah.

And I had to agree. Are there some times that I'm really trying to get a hold of you and it's kind of difficult? Sometimes, you know. Yeah, I just don't. I put it. It's in the charger and I'm not near it most of the day. So that's the problem. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, man. But you're my number one VIP. I will tell you that. They're all the same. Okay. No, I'll take it. I'll take it. Well, I'm just saying on my list, you're above Mike. I'm just saying. Okay. Okay. I don't know how that happened. Daisy comes first alphabetically, though.

I'll take it. Yeah, sure. We're both in so much trouble when people listen to this. Yeah. I think the, the only other kind of thing I would touch on is for me, at least is just because I think it's maybe a little unusual is that my iPad is permanently and do not disturb. Yeah. That I saw that. I'm like, really? Okay. Yeah. Cause I don't really work on my iPad. Like it's basically just like a TV and podcast machine. Yeah.

And so I've done none of this work on my iPad. It's just permanently and do not disturb. So it's outside of the focus syncing thing. Like I have it off on the iPad. Um, and so like I actually looked at notification center when I was getting ready for this and my word, it's a, it's a disgusting nightmare on my iPad, but you know what? I never look at it. And, uh, you know, I, I cleared them all and now it's in do not disturb. And, uh,

So yeah, maybe you've got a device like that in your life where you're like, you know what? I actually don't want any notifications. And that's okay too. It's funny to me because like,

So you describe it as a consumption device. So for my, on my side, a consumption device would be something where I would probably allow more notifications. Yeah. You know, but, but it makes sense. Like if you're watching something, you don't want to be in, have notifications dropping down on top of you. I think you're probably smarter than I am on this. Oh, maybe we'll see what people say about that. I just, as I was kind of just inspecting my own life here in this regard, I was like,

Oh, is that a thing people do? Like, I don't know.

I actually would like, I want to say before I forget, every episode of Mac Power Users has a thread at talk.macpowerusers.com in our forums. I would love to hear interesting notification strategies from people. Like I was talking about the doctor earlier. I think there's a lot of people out there that because of their job or their life or whatever, have like interesting takes on how to set notifications up.

And I would love to feature some of those in the next feedback episode. I think that thread would be the perfect place. So if you have something interesting to share, log into the forum and leave a few notes. I'd love to hear that. Because I'm always looking for ways to improve mine, frankly. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a complicated thing, as we have discovered today.

Complicated, but necessarily complicated. But I will also say complicated, but it's not that hard to wrangle them. Like I said, Apple gives you so many ways to do it, whether you're in the notification screen itself and just swiping, or you go into the settings section,

You know, nobody listening to this show is unable to wrangle their notifications. You've just got to go in and do it. And my argument is it doesn't take nearly as long as you think it is. And it's one of those things where a little investment of time just increases the quality of your life in dramatic ways. You get so much bang for your buck here, right? Because now every time you get a notification, it's worth reading. Yep. Agreed.

All right. I think we've preached enough about notifications. Do go into the forums if you have time and let us know what you're doing. I'd love to hear that. Please. We are the Mac Power. You can find us over at relay.fm.com.

We're going to be talking deep about DeepSeek in the More Power Users episode. If you are not a More Power User, maybe consider joining. It's the membership version of our show. You get an ad-free extended version of the show every darn week. So we'd love you to check that out. Go over to relay.fm slash MPU. Thank you to our sponsors this week, 1Password and Ecamm. And we'll see you next time.