HOW I GOT MY IPHONE NOTIFICATIONS UNDER CONTROL AND RESTORED MY SANITY

OUR PHONES BEG FOR OUR ATTENTION ALL DAY LONG, CONTINUOUSLY. BREAK FREE FROM THE CYCLE AND TAKE BACK YOUR LIFE!

- JASON CROSS

The constant buzzing and dinging. The screen lighting up a dozen times an hour. A pages-long list of little rounded rectangles, too big to scroll through, filling up our lock screens.

Notifications have outlived their usefulness at least most of the time. What started as a way for apps and the operating system to let us know about something important, something you want to take action on right now, has been abused by app developers who beg for our eyeballs almost constantly. It's the attention economy.

So now we're all stuck in an awful purgatory. We either check our phones hundreds of times a day to see what that latest noise was all about, or we ignore them and potentially miss something actually important. To mangle a phrase from "The Incredibles": When everything is critically important, nothing is.

Fortunately, iOS has everything you need to curate your notifications. Focus Modes are the latest tool in the toolbox, but I think it's overly complex. Setting up multiple Focus modes is a powerful and flexible thing, but it requires a decent amount of time and attention, and most people have shown they are unwilling to spend it on taming notifications (fave.co/3jYmWCm).

But you need to master Focus to control your notifications. Over the years I've refined a simple set of rules for my notifications that have cut them down to just a handful a day. I don't feel like I miss anything important, and more importantly, my iPhone feels like something I use when I want to rather than a taskmaster or a needy child begging for attention.

Here's my method for managing notifications. It takes about 10 minutes to set up, and then just a few seconds whenever you install a new app.