[jgroszko]

A lot of my smart phone usage lately seems to be around managing how much attention my phone can grab from me. I let very few apps send me notifications on my phone. I check it enough without it making noises at me.

And if an app doesn't let me disable notifications then I just uninstall it. Facebook Messenger was awful about this, when I saw there was no "Disable notifications", only a "Turn notifications off for 24 hours" option I immediately uninstalled it. Facebook was even worse, ostensibly you could turn notification types off individually, but whenever they added a new type of notification you'd have to go in and turn that off too, or it'd just forget what other notifications you had turned off and you'd start getting them again. Amusingly uninstalling the Facebook app gave me a nice battery performance boost too.

Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. Why should any random person on the internet be able to grab my attention like that?

[wutbrodo]

One regrettable casualty of this is that I've noticed that almost everyone I know is super unresponsive to texts now. I'm not expecting a fully-interrupt-driven ability to grab someone's attention at any time, but ive even seen cases when you're actively in conversation with someone about something concrete (eg details of a plan) and they drop off in the middle of it. I still think this is pretty rude, but its understandable given that they haven't bothered to make their notifications higher granularity (for my part, I've disabled notifications at the Android level for most of the abusive apps, like Facebook)

> Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family.

I figure the next step in the evolution of norms will be this understanding of granularity filtering down to the non-tech-savvy masses.

[slantyyz]

Call me old school, but for conversations relating to something concrete and time sensitive, I prefer to do a voice call. I don't trust any text based medium for that.

I use a hierarchy when it comes to prioritizing communications and notifications: Voice > sms > work im/email > personal im/email

Based on that hierarchy, I have different sets of rules as to the types of notifications I get and when I get them.

[tomjen3]

I have an android phone, but it allows you to long-press any notifaction for an app and turn that apps ability to notify of. That is a system feature, not an app feature.

And I know you can permanently turn notifications of for any given contact because I have done so for one who didn't understand that messenger is not for long conversations that should have been on email, just because you typically get a quicker reply.