Too Many iPhone Notifications Driving You Crazy? Here’s How to Turn Them Off and Reclaim Your Sanity

Notifications are really useful and a fundamental element to know what is happening in our virtual environment. Too many notifications, however, makes us end up overlooking the important ones, such as AirDrop, and, at the same time, have us looking at our phone all day long. Fortunately, we can turn them off and keep our peace of mind.

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Identify problematic applications

Before starting to deactivate notifications, it is essential to identify which applications generate the most distractions. These can be social networks, instant messaging applications, emails, among others.

To identify them all we have to do is follow these steps:

1. We open the Settings app on our iPhone or iPad.
2. Go to Time of use.
3. Tap on View all activity.
4. At the bottom, under “Notifications” we will find a count of those applications that are responsible for the most notifications.

Disabling or configuring notifications for each application

From this same section, we can take action. For any application in the list that we see that abuses notifications, we can take several actions. Let’s start, in any case, by touching it to enter the options. Then here’s what we can do:

• Turn off notifications completely: if we do not want to receive notifications from a particular application, we simply disable the “Allow notifications” option to stop them completely.
• Mute notifications: if we prefer to receive notifications, but do so without sound, we can go into Sounds and then select None.
• Modify how notifications appear: we can enable or disable the Strips appearing on the unlocked screen, and we can also enable or disable the notifications in question appearing on the Locked Screen or in the Notification Center.
• Avoid balloons on icons: if we want to avoid that a red number on the app icon draws our attention unnecessarily, we can disable the Balloons option.
• Configure notification announcement: the Announce notifications feature makes Siri read them aloud to us when we use headphones or are driving. A tap on this section allows us to disable Announce notifications to avoid this behavior.

Review general settings

All the settings we have just seen are also available in general. That is, if we have now turned our attention to the applications that send us the most notifications, we can do the same with all of them. Just follow these steps:

1. We open the Settings app on our iPhone or iPad.
2. Go to the Notifications section.

Here we have several options. In addition to entering any of them to modify the settings we mentioned in the previous section, it is also a good idea to disable notifications from those applications that, although they rarely send them to us, we do not need.

Configure notification summaries

The idea of notification summaries is that as different notifications come in, the system will see which app they come from and, depending on our settings, will either draw our attention to it or save the notification for us to see later.

Configuring these summaries of notifications is very simple and we can do it indistinctly on our iPhone or iPad. The steps to follow are as follows:

1. We open the Settings app on our iPhone or iPad.
2. Go to Notifications.
3. Tap on Scheduled Summary.
4. Activate Scheduled Summary.

In Schedule is where, through Add summary, we can define how many we want to receive each day and also define the time we want them to arrive. Then, in the list of applications, we can mark the notifications of which apps will remain in these daily summaries.

Use the “Do Not Disturb” mode for pauses

The “Do Not Disturb” mode is a function that silences all calls and notifications from our iPhone. To activate it we can go to the Control Center or directly tell Siri something like “Hey Siri, activate Do Not Disturb mode for a couple of hours” to have a pause in the notifications.

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As we started by saying, notifications are really useful and a fundamental element to know what is happening in our virtual environment, but too many of them make the whole system lose sense. Our iPhone, fortunately, offers us all the necessary tools so that, just as we can customize the iPhone home screen to make it unique, we are informed without being overwhelmed.

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