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My personal remedy If I ever get a notification on my phone that isn't a human trying to interact with me I immediately disable the notification and/or app. W

by kneel 10y ago

My personal remedy If I ever get a notification on my phone that isn't a human trying to interact with me I immediately disable the notification and/or app. With email I often (daily) unsubscribe from whatever impersonal newsletter shows up in my inbox. I save my attention for people who take time to message me personally. Red badges on my phone are irritating.

hrnnnnnn 10y ago
Same here. It takes a few seconds every time it happens and saves you a bunch of wasted attention in the future.
slazaro 10y ago
I go even further with email: Every email I get, if getting instantly notified by it and interrupting me is not necessary, I later add a filter for archiving it. Then, my inbox is for things to deal with soon, archived mails are for other stuff. Now I only get notified by actual important stuff, or unknown senders.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  A whitelist, blacklist, greylist solution works well for this, possibly with the addition of a "backlist". Whitelist: Inbox. High-priority senders. Blacklist: Trash / treat as spam. One model is to add an address to your blacklist as you unsubscribe it. Any further messages feed spam filters. Greylist: Previously unseen. This goes to a bucket for sorting through. You can apply more heuristics to this (keyword / sender / references, etc.). Backlist: Known low-priority senders. It basically goes into the "deal with it later" file. Anything that's specifically sortable (e.g., technical mailing lists) goes to its own space. My fundamental problem is that few tools offer the means to do this type of sorting. Gmail's filters are, the more I use them, increasingly pathetic. Procmail is powerful -- I've built up highly extensive filters with it over decades. But it's also a pain to use, largely unmaintained and unmaintainable. It lacks a simple means to, say, point at a list of addresses and say "good, bad, or ugly". Adding addresses specifically to rulesets is somewhat tedious. And as with other cleint-side tools, it doesn't work with IMAP services in a reasonable way (you can treat IMAP as POP, but then you lose filtering for all other clients accessing the server). There are some other tools -- there's a ... Perl? based tool, Mail<mumble>, which is cleaner than procmail but also different and I've not wrapped my head around it. There are IMAP-based tools, but I've had little luck with them. Email's generally simply getting crufty. I've resisted calling for a replacement for a while, but increasingly, it's time.
reledi 10y ago
I used to do this but endlessly pruning distractions itself became an unwanted distraction. My current approach is to do nothing and only act on important notifications/emails. It's not Inbox Zero, it's Inbox Zero Fucks Given.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I went through a similar process a month ago. Every time some notification popped up, if it wasn't interesting, I either deleted the app itself (when I realized I don't even use it - e.g. Instagram), disabled push notifications for it (countless of e.g. Facebook groups) or just muted it on my Pebble (so that it shows up on the phone, but doesn't vibrate my wrist). At the same time, I begun aggressively unsubscribing from every single e-mail newsletter that came to my inbox that I didn't find immediately useful. Few days of that process, and suddenly my mail and notification load dropped to like 10% of its usual value, and I realized how much more relaxed and focused I am during the day.

by kneel 10y ago

hrnnnnnn 10y ago

Same here. It takes a few seconds every time it happens and saves you a bunch of wasted attention in the future.

slazaro 10y ago

I go even further with email: Every email I get, if getting instantly notified by it and interrupting me is not necessary, I later add a filter for archiving it. Then, my inbox is for things to deal with soon, archived mails are for other stuff. Now I only get notified by actual important stuff, or unknown senders.

dredmorbius 10y ago
A whitelist, blacklist, greylist solution works well for this, possibly with the addition of a "backlist". Whitelist: Inbox. High-priority senders. Blacklist: Trash / treat as spam. One model is to add an address to your blacklist as you unsubscribe it. Any further messages feed spam filters. Greylist: Previously unseen. This goes to a bucket for sorting through. You can apply more heuristics to this (keyword / sender / references, etc.). Backlist: Known low-priority senders. It basically goes into the "deal with it later" file. Anything that's specifically sortable (e.g., technical mailing lists) goes to its own space. My fundamental problem is that few tools offer the means to do this type of sorting. Gmail's filters are, the more I use them, increasingly pathetic. Procmail is powerful -- I've built up highly extensive filters with it over decades. But it's also a pain to use, largely unmaintained and unmaintainable. It lacks a simple means to, say, point at a list of addresses and say "good, bad, or ugly". Adding addresses specifically to rulesets is somewhat tedious. And as with other cleint-side tools, it doesn't work with IMAP services in a reasonable way (you can treat IMAP as POP, but then you lose filtering for all other clients accessing the server). There are some other tools -- there's a ... Perl? based tool, Mail<mumble>, which is cleaner than procmail but also different and I've not wrapped my head around it. There are IMAP-based tools, but I've had little luck with them. Email's generally simply getting crufty. I've resisted calling for a replacement for a while, but increasingly, it's time.

reledi 10y ago

I used to do this but endlessly pruning distractions itself became an unwanted distraction. My current approach is to do nothing and only act on important notifications/emails. It's not Inbox Zero, it's Inbox Zero Fucks Given.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

I went through a similar process a month ago. Every time some notification popped up, if it wasn't interesting, I either deleted the app itself (when I realized I don't even use it - e.g. Instagram), disabled push notifications for it (countless of e.g. Facebook groups) or just muted it on my Pebble (so that it shows up on the phone, but doesn't vibrate my wrist). At the same time, I begun aggressively unsubscribing from every single e-mail newsletter that came to my inbox that I didn't find immediately useful. Few days of that process, and suddenly my mail and notification load dropped to like 10% of its usual value, and I realized how much more relaxed and focused I am during the day.