Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Messenger, Flipkart, Myntra, Amazon, Truecaller, Gmail, Telegram, Paytm, Swiggy, Zomato, Reddit, Pinterest, Medium etc.
All these apps have one most common thing is that they generate a lot of notification to lure you in and let you use their service.
I receive average 300 notifications per day which means my phone vibrates or rings 300 times a day and I unlock my phone and swipe or click these notifications at least 150 times a day.
This feels very concerning when I notice that most notifications are just useless to me and still, I have to look them up and either swipe them to disappear or click them to see.
Most notifications are annoying and just a bunch of garbage.
Let’s see some real-world examples.
On twitter, I get notification about random people that I do not even follow.
Sale countdowns from Flipkart, Myntra like platforms which are in fact nothing but just the clever price and discount game. I am not interested into unnecessary shopping.
Food ordering platforms like Zomato and Swiggy make a pile of creative but mostly unwanted notifications to promote food ordering through their app.
Tell me how many times you have read a notification from Zomato or Swiggy and ordered a food because of it? No! We mostly open and use these apps when we need to.
We know this very well but still we are being bombarded with notifications and we are clearing them up by ourselves. Isn’t something that we call ‘Forced Labor’ or ‘Slave labor’?
Aren’t we wiping the turd that somebody else did?
Instagram notifies you about who made new post, who posted a story, likes, comments, follows, group chat notifications, live streams, and much more unnecessary ones.
Facebook has been a junkbox lately and I guess most of us don’t use it anymore. It also notifies you about unwanted events that you don’t even want to hear or see.
LinkedIn daily rundowns and job alerts are much more useless and all of them don’t provide you any kind of value. How many of you have applied to a job the one LinkedIn notifies about and you got the job?
Mostly of us do not apply to each job that LinkedIn notifies. And maybe we are always able to find and search the right kind of job inside the app but notifications about most job alerts goes straight into the bin by swiping right.
YouTube has a dedicated button to turn on the notifications for each channel you watch, and they have made it a part of their algorithm.
Let’s say you have subscribed 50 active channels on the YouTube with their bell icon pressed. Now you will get a notification whenever these 50 channels upload something new.
There are less likely chances that you will click them and see each of them.
Because if you want a better understanding on some topic in a video format, no place is better than YouTube for it. You open it and search for the topic and learn it, now If you learned better with any specific channel, you might subscribe it and press the bell icon in hope to see more content like this but trust me you will less likely watch their videos again because today you needed to learn something and you did but not always you would like to learn every random thing that the channel uploads.
See the count of your subscribed channels in library section on YouTube and that will give you an idea about how much notifications you will get from YouTube and how many are worth clicking.
Group notifications from WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Discord and Pinterest and reddit communities are mostly about nonsense talks and content.
Gmail works like the repeater of notifications that you have missed or swipe. Any notification from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or else that you missed or neglected will be come back to you as an email.
Most commonly, you subscribe any website or digital service with your google account and your Gmail becomes a hub or a gate pass to use those services. So, every update from your personalized internet world will be served to you as an email and further as a notification.
So much of notifications, vibrations, rings, screen unlocks, swipes, clicks and more clicks. Eventually these things clog up your mind with the information of no use. More importantly these things produce annoyance and affect your brain in a worse way.
For keeping the mind clean, you should keep your notification bar clean too.
If there’s any vibrations or ring on your phone, it must be only the important one.
You really need to take some action against this mess. You should inspect each and every app in your smartphone that causes you unwanted distraction through notifications and do some tapering.
In android, long press the app and go into particular App settings, check which notifications from the app are important and useful to you and turn on these only.
Change app permissions to those ones, the app needed to do the desired function. No unnecessary permission should be given to the app. Like giving microphone access to Flipkart, Myntra or Amazon like ecommerce platforms because there is not any significant use for this.
Trust me, if you will keep your smartphone notification bar neat and clean. You will be happy.
You should only be exposed to the information you’re really need to know. Having a pile of unnecessary notifications reduce the quality and mess up your brain by storing useless information.
Apps or companies these days have crossed the limitations of ethical boundaries and are making clever marketing and clickbait campaigns just to benefit themselves only.
They are learning about your behavior pattern and your thinking process to predict what you want and provide it to you before you even know you needed it.
Consumers are being forced to consume trash and before they complain, companies already have become successful enough to suppress your voices and ambush your efforts.
It all starts with a bait, a notification. They want you to take it and fall right into their fancy trap.
Be aware of what you see, consume and what your smartphone does. You’re being targeted already.
See you next time with some meaningful solutions to declutter your smartphone and brain.