I set my phone to 'do not disturb' three years ago – and have never looked back | Hacker News Reader

I set my phone to 'do not disturb' three years ago – and have never looked back

theguardian.com

48 pointsjethronethro65 comments

>I’ve still had to work on my self-discipline, so that I don’t spend all my time checking my phone to see what I’ve missed. This is, arguably, the hardest part – the lure of a potential unread message can be profound

Yep, you can either poll, or you can respond to interrupts.

Me, my phone is usually not on DND but it's always on silent. I turn off notifications for everything except messaging apps. Most apps end abusing them sooner or later to send you marketing nonsense, or "you haven't used me in a while, I'm lonely" crap.

I'm amazed anyone can get anything done with noisy/vibratey notifications.

I'd love for a half half solution here.

Where the phone collects notifications silently for an hour, then if there are any meeting the "alert" bar, it just buzzes or tones on the hour. Or whatever interval I choose.

I think a few times a day is plenty for my notifications, except for a couple of close friends and family -- but they're all in the same bucket. An app I installed yesterday who's messages I need but are not urgent, and a lifelong friend? Same value to the phone OS.

I'm thankful for the star contacts on Android working through dnd, but would love an aggregate/timed system for bulk stuff.

iOS has this https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/07/07/how-to-use-notifica...

> I’m probably a nightmare to get hold of at a moment’s notice – and should never, ever be someone’s In Case of Emergency, much to my partner’s chagrin

iOS’ Do Not Disturb has a feature—on by default—where a second phone call from the same person within three minutes is not silenced.

I see this option on Android (unchangable 15mins but it's an outdated LineageOS version)

There's also a feature to let specific contacts bypass DND. My immediate family's calls are not affected by DND, and Pagerduty's calls come in as a critical notification.

I also disabled this. The reason I used DND in the first place was because I was playing League of Legends Wild Rift on my phone and mid battle my mum would call me, which takes up the entire screen mid-battle, essentially getting me killed.

If my mum and probably others don't get through the first time, they'll try again and again thinking something is broken, until it gets through due to this setting

At least in my country, s[pc]ammers are well aware of this function and call 5-6 times in a row if you don't pick up the phone.

For iOS, turn on do not disturb. Also turn off Siri and "Apple intelligence". Set Messages to Focus. Turn off Send Read Receipts. Also turn on Filter Unknown Senders.

Install and enable Hiya or similar for calls.

Adjust your notification settings for apps like Lyft, Uber, and Uber Eats. They like to spam notifications as ads.

For adblocking, 1Blocker and AdGuard work great.

For YouTube on mobile web, use Vinegar.

I am 99% protected from ads with this setup

For the remaining, use old.reddit.com.

For websites with annoying subscription popovers, use reader mode. This doesn't work everywhere but does in a lot of places.

After all this filtering, I have absolutely no interest in anything that gets through.

Note, “Apple Intelligence” keeps turning itself back on after each update

Then moving to EU would do the trick. We still don't have it

You know that's literally impossible for most people, right?

Moving to the EU also fixes a lot of privacy and regulatory issues.

I still can't believe the EU ended up with the first official and fully legally protected alternative app store, it would have sounded crazy a decade ago.

Then we would have to deal with more pop ups. EU laws has led to as much enshittification of the web as any adtech company.

“Enshittification” is a specific and well-defined term for platform decay in pursuit of profits, it doesn’t mean “anything I dislike”.

This EU hate on account of the banners is misguided: We should be upset at the companies engaging in unfettered data collection and tracking, not the body that made it mandatory for them to reveal their practices. It’s as if your government enacted a law saying restaurants had to inform you whenever they piss in your food, you begin to see warnings everywhere, and then complain about the law instead of the rampant pissing.

I'm in the UK. After an update yesterday it was asking me to enable it on my M1 Mac

Apple Intelligence has been available in the EU since at least macOS 15.2.

AI features are the most bizarrely aggressively pushed things that has ever happened.

Only thing like it I can think of is the frame interpolation "true motion" things TV manufacturers keep defaulting to on.

are you me? Also, for mobile web, I always request desktop version. "No, I don't want to EVER install your app, you weirdos."

> Install and enable Hiya or similar for calls.

App page says:

> Hiya AI Phone transcribes and summarizes your calls automatically, ...

A few things: 1. it's not free (trial available, though) 2. their privacy policy is extensive and admits (obviously) they have EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. Your PII and your phone calls. 3. During the trial you are not a customer AND you're giving up your data.

Assuming you become a customer, the real question I have: how much can I trust them? Because they would require an extraordinary amount of trust for me to become a customer.

Link to the ToS https://www.hiya.com/legal/terms-of-service

Overall you aren't incorrect. However to point out, you don't have to pay for the service if you're ok with what comes with the free tier.

For me, I rarely use my phone for the purpose of phone calls. 99% of what Hiya gets from me are spam calls plus my current location. (Wooo I'm in SF, such a big data loss). Occasionally my mom calls me, though we're usually on WhatsApp. (Yes FB blah blah).

Make your own choices. When/if Apple implements actually high level call blocking I'll switch to it (goulash monster willing). For now I'm personally ok with Hiya. If you want to build another service that addresses your privacy concerns then I'll check it out and consider switching.

For me the utility of not getting annoyed all the time is greater than the lack of important data any 3rd party might be collecting.

Actually to address even that, go into the Hiya settings and just turn off things like geolocation sharing.

You forgot: rub your head clockwise, and your belly counter clockwise, while repeating "I am master of my notifications". ... /sarky

I get all this, but I'm starting to see things the way that that my friends who have no smartphones or other distractivices do.

I did the same thing years ago and have never regretted it. I really just hate my phone randomly vibrating and taking my attention over some dumb notification I don't really care about -- or feeling ghost vibrations in my pocket where I have to keep pulling out my phone to see if it was a notification or my imagination.

Turns out nothing is really that time critical that it can't wait until the next time I check my phone, which is usually on a surface in front of me anyway.

You can generally turn off notifications. A lot of people want to be reached for any number of reasons with respect to family members etc.

On iOS you can set Favorite contacts and then allow them to call you despite Do Not Disturb being active.

Also if the same number calls you 3 times in 5 minutes, it will ring through

I turned off the equivalent setting in Android because spammers will call multiple times in quick succession.

A great feature, Android has this also

The problem is that it’s not necessarily your contact that is trying to contact you with respect to a family member etc.

You can also just say "No" when an app asks to send notifications. People don't seem to realise that you have complete control over when your phone dings for your attention.

A dark pattern some apps used is they use their own notification prompt first, and then the system one. The system won't reprompt if you deny it, so I tell the app "Yes", to then say "No" to iOS. This mostly does a good job of stopping the nagging.

There are a lot of applications that use the same notification channel for important things (like credit card transactions) and meaningless spam (and changing banks is not always possible for reasons outside of our control). The channels were supposed to solve this problem, but Google is not enforcing the "purity" of their usage afaik.

And that’s some of the problem. I don’t consider a random credit card transaction that I may make multiple times a day terribly important unless it’s over $1K or whatever.

In my experience, I've not found an app that sends a mix of both genuinely useful and spam notifications.

I just block all notifications. The only things that go through are Whatsapp and calls. Even that is limited to a few people. All group notifs are turned off. Honestly i've got no idea why people would check random notifications

I also found an option in ios that hides incoming calls from non-contacts. You just find missing calls afterwards (and ignore these). Turned it on and never looked back too. I have zero interest in non-contacts contacting me.

Unless I'm not aware of another option, this one still allows the incoming calls to interrupt your display with a notification, albeit silently.

Are you referring to “Silence Unknown Callers”? Last I had it activated, it didn’t show an unknown call as a notification. It just sent them to voicemail and updated the badge on the phone app.

I really like the android feature that does this when you put the phone face down. It's such an easy toggle

As an owner of an android. How?

On my phone it is...

Settings > Notifications > Do Not Disturb > Schedules > Flip to Shhh

Interesting, is not there on my galaxy fold

Nor on my S20 Ultra. Looks like an app is needed on non-Pixel phones these days (Play Store "flip to dnd").

I got my first iPhone a few weeks ago, and was surprised and disappointed to find this missing. It makes for such an easy routine when going to bed, or into a meeting or whatever.

Would be interested in seeing how the author's position has evolved in a few years when her children are in school, have activities, are with friends and need a pick up.

My phone is set to DND, but I have exceptions for parental friends, school, WhatsApp (as we use it exclusively for parent groups)

The rest can stay quiet. Takes some effort to get everything fine tuned but worth it

You can set contacts to bypass do-not-disturb settings. At least on the iPhone you can.

For the past 10 years I’ve only allowed two types of “notifications”

Phone calls. Vibration allowed, never sound.

Text/whatsapp messages. They are allowed to simply appear on the lock screen. No vibrations, no sound.

That’s it, for everything else I have to manually open the app to check it.

It’s shocking to me to see how the vast majority of people live with a constant barrage of notifications of which a huge majority are spam and/or not important at all.

It seems like it would be in the phone companies's best interests to clean up phone calls. The one case where we should be willing to interrupt what we're doing is when someone calls. That's how it always was and it was okay.

The breakdown was when calling became impersonal, with telemarketing. But I remember a time years ago when a phone call meant something.

Maybe I’m an outlier but I keep notifications enabled, aggressively disabling them at the slightest annoyance (ad, too many for an app I don’t care about, etc). I also use focus modes for sleep and other activities.

I like that I can control when I get notifications without having to completely disable them.

Alongside privacy and security, knowing how to be in control of notifications rather than the other way around has become an essential skill.

It should really be block by default, enable in a case per case basis. But there are perverse incentives for the system to work against the user.

I just use tiered notifications. Messaging apps or things I should respond to immediately have push notifications on (interrupts). Things I don’t need to reply to urgently like email only have badge icons (red counter) (so, polled). I go zero inbox and clean until the badges are all gone at least once a day. Most apps have notifications disabled.

I really can’t stand any social media stuff giving notifications. It should never ever rise to “interrupt” priority. For me.

I've kept my Android phone on silent for years. I just don't like it beeping and interrupting all the time. I do miss a few phone calls but I figure, they'll leave a message if it's important.

Silent mode and face down really quiets down one's day and puts the phone back in its place as a tool you use only when you need it.

I set my phone to DnD about 10 yrs ago when I first installed telegram, because it was really annoying to get a notif on my computer and then have my phone buzz a few seconds later every single time.

If this was somehow fixed I might consider turning it off.

You just disable notifications for Telegram.

I've pretty much always kept my phone on silent. I don't mind notifications while I'm on my phone anyways, but if I do manage not to check on it for a while I see that as a good thing.

Going on about a decade now. Plus carrying two phones and get mails and chats round the clock thanks to colleagues in different timezones so anything else would just lead to actual insanity

Same, I'm on DND 24/7, and I love it. For me, it was the recruiters constantly cold-calling and demanding my attention while I was trying to work.

If I ever do this I'll blame tech recruiters who don't care what time zone I live in.

However things have been quite a bit better in that regard lately... :(

It's as though, as we get more and more addicted to phones, smaller and smaller acts of willpower count as worthy of bragging about.

Some time ago, after going through about five years of terminal connectivity to my job via Slack, I got a new phone and just... didn't reinstall Slack.

You are probably expecting me to start listing off all the benefits, how my life is 127% better, I sleep 42 extra minutes each night and so on.

I wish it were that simple.

The good is that, in the three years I've not had Slack installed on my phone, I've missed important night/weekend events exactly twice - and in both cases, they were improper escalations directly to me (we have a pager rotation for this exact scenario).

The bad news is that I still find myself anxious that I'm missing something - because frankly, I probably am, even if it's low-priority. It's kind of like taking out a loan against tomorrow, where I'll have to catch up on a series of decisions that were made without my involvement, or talk someone through what they _should_ have done when I could've simply led them down the right path.

My mandatory plug for a non-disturbed phone https://phone.wtf

Easy if you don't have or don't care enough about family who may be in an emergency to reach out to you.

There is a feature to set do not disturb to allow notifications from certain contacts, or types of notifications. I have set it up to receive chats frlm family and calls

On iOS, you can break through dnd with repeated calls (unless you turn that off, too).

Did the same to my mind at 36 - Now 50 and feeling great.

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