Minimizing Notifications–Staying Sane & Efficient

3 min readJan 22, 2018

It amazes me when people have thousands of unread emails and notifications. How are you able to get anything done? How are you able to filter out the important emails and respond appropriately? Part of being sane and efficient is cutting out noise from your life and only paying attention to what really matters.

Emails: Use Labels & Filters to Achieve Inbox 0

If you are using Gmail, which you should be doing, then you should be filtering and labeling your emails. Setting up a filter for an email is easy–when you get an email, right click the down-caret on the right and select “Filter messages like this”:

Then click “Create filter with this search”. I “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” a lot of emails, so my inbox remains empty. Some emails are labeled so that I can find them easy. For example, I automatically archive donations I make to charities, but label them as “Donations” so that they are easy to find during tax season.

When making a new filter, be sure to select “Also apply filter to matching conversations” so that it applies to all our old emails. By repeating this process, you can get your inbox to 0 emails and keep it that way very easily.

GitHub

If you’re constantly on GitHub, you do not need to be emailed. Just check your GitHub notifications. I keep mine minimal so that I only get notified if someone mentions or assigns me. Otherwise, I don’t care what’s going on in GitHub.

First, disable all emails!

Next, for notifications, do not automatically watch repositories and disable emails:

Go to https://github.com/watching by clicking the “things you’re watching” link above and unwatch all the repositories you don’t care about. Or start from scratch and unwatch everything, then slowly watch repositories you care about!

Slack

Only get notified when someone is actually trying to talk to you directly. Don’t try to keep up with every single channel. If it’s important for you, then someone will ping you directly.