An email-free night

I use my iPhone 5 as my bedside alarm clock, but my work involves colleagues from several different timezones and consequently I receive work emails at any hour of the day. Is there a way to turn notifications on and off easily, so that I can get a decent night’s sleep without being bombarded by work stuff? I don’t want to use Do Not Disturb because I want to be able to receive phone calls and texts, both of which would only be from friends and family. It’s just the email notifications I need to disable. Gary Spence The only way to do it in iOS 7 is by opening the Settings app > Notification Centre and disabling Show on Lock Screen for all the accounts in the Mail app that receive work emails. Unfortunately, that’s not convenient to do every evening and morning and Siri can’t help, either.

I think the wider problem here is not that iOS doesn’t let you customise your notifications in this way: it’s that you are sleeping with your phone next to your bed. A phone’s job is to interrupt you with information after all; it doesn’t make a great bedside companion! If you put it in the next room, you’ll still hear the ringtone or SMS alert, but you won’t see the email notifications. Perhaps you should just get a regular alarm clock for the bedroom?