KILL NAGGING NOTIFICATIONS
Fine-tune notifications
Sometimes it can feel like Windows is fighting against you. Every ping, beep and pop-up will be enough to break your attention. You might not think this is anything to worry about, but the University of California, Irvine, argues it takes an average of 23mins 15secs to return to your task every time you are interrupted. You need to take control of nagging notifications.
This isn’t to say kill them all. Action Centre, Windows 10’s main method of getting in touch, can be used to your advantage because many notifications – including Facebook updates and emails – can offer a way to instantly reply. Others allow you to authorise actions (such as “Mark as read”) directly without digging into the application. Twist Action Centre to your needs and it can be useful.
First, control which notifications are allowed to pop up. Open Settings, click through to “Notifications & actions” in the System section, and toggle the switches beside each app. At the very least, switch off calendar and mail notifications if these are also set to appear on your phone. With calendars often setting reminders by default, it’s not unusual for an alert to appear simultaneously on your desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. That’s an instant recipe for insanity.
Scroll down to find the settings for individual applications. Although it’s not immediately obvious, clicking their headings rather than the switches beside them lets you dig deeper for finer-grained control.
Click Calendar, for example, and aside from toggling permission to display notifications, which you can do from the overview, it lets you set if they can appear on the lockscreen, if they should make a sound when they arrive, how many should display in Action Centre if several are due at the same time and more.
You can even choose on an app-by -app basis if its notifications are top, high or normal priority, with those further up the scale being positioned towards the top of the screen, so they’re visible without scrolling.
If you want to take things further, you can disable notifications entirely from the top-level Notifications & actions pane by toggling the switch below “Get notifications from apps and other senders”. This is probably overkill, but you should certainly disable two options below it: “Get tips, tricks and suggestions as you use Windows” and “Show me the Windows welcome experience after updates and occasionally when I sign in to highlight what’s new and suggested”. The first of those will also turn off the inducements to try Edge instead of your current browser.
Turn a blind eye
Notification badges are among the most distracting elements in any OS. Right-clicking the Action Centre bubble gives you the option to turn these off, as well as hiding your app icons and switching on Quiet Hours.
The Quiet Hours setting mutes all notifications until the “hours” expire. The default, which can’t be changed, runs from midnight until 6am, but if you want to extend them, simply switch them on and off manually.
You should be able to rely on Microsoft to know how best to patch your PC, so while retaining a degree of control over which patches and fixes are applied might be comforting, it’s rarely necessary. Open Windows Defender Security Center, click on Settings and turn off notifications for recent activity and scan results. You can do the same for firewall settings, as long as you bear in mind that if a newly-installed app refuses to work it could be because it’s unable to connect to an authentication server.
Changing your active hours will reduce the number of System Update notifications you receive. By default, active hours are set to expire at 5pm, so if you routinely work beyond this, or you use your PC in the evening, you’ll be interrupted by Windows asking if it can go ahead and update.
The active hours option is in the Windows Update section of Settings. Set the end of your active hours to 11pm or later to have Windows update overnight. Note that your active hours can’t be more than 18 hours a day.
Log in automatically
If you’re the only person who uses your PC, you can disable the one interruption we all encounter daily: the login screen.
Find and launch “netplwiz” through the search bar, then uncheck the box beside “Users must enter a username and password to use this computer”. Click Apply and netplwiz will ask you to specify which user should be automatically logged in, and for the appropriate password.
While this will save you time when rebooting, it’s a risky step – especially if the automatically logged-in user has administrator access. We recommend setting up a separate, limited account for automatic logging in so that, before anyone who gains access to your machine can do too much damage, they still need to switch users and provide appropriate login credentials.
Zero out your to-dos
App badges, such as the one on the email app icon that shows how many messages remain unread, are another distraction you can turn off. They’re the app’s way of demanding your
immediate attention, rather than waiting until you’re ready for them.
Open Settings and navigate through Personalization to Taskbar, where you can toggle off the setting for “Show badges on taskbar buttons”.
While you’re here, click through to “Select which icons appear on the taskbar” and “Turn system icons on or off”, both of which are also found in the Taskbar pane. The former lets you hide icons for apps such as Dropbox, while the latter lets you remove status icons such as battery power, sound and so on. While we’d retain both battery and sound, we’re inclined to hide Action Centre as it can easily be called up manually using Win+A.
Tame apps
A lot of applications have their own notification settings, which can only be changed through the apps themselves. Dropbox’s preferences, for example, has checkboxes for mentions, comments, tasks, shares, syncs and edits, all of which can be manually turned off. Just bear in mind that, if you’re using Dropbox as part of a team, this could impair your ability to keep up with your colleagues.
Monitor which apps ask the most questions and target them over time. Web browsers are common culprits, so look at trimming the number of times they need your intervention. In Chrome settings, for example, disable the “Ask where to save each file before downloading” option, which you’ll find in the Advanced settings section.
In Edge, open Settings | Advanced settings, and toggle off “Ask me what to do with each download” so they’re automatically sent to the Downloads folder. Scroll down to Notifications and click Manage, then toggle off any web apps that are allowed to notify you. Why? Because these notifications don’t just appear within the browser: they also pop up in Windows itself, and can post to the Action Centre.
In Internet Explorer, open Internet Options| Advanced and clear the checkboxes beside “Notify when downloads complete” and “Tell me if Internet Explorer is not the default web browser”. Make sure the pop-up blocker is enabled on the Privacy tab, then click Settings and uncheck the box to “Show Notification bar when a pop-up is blocked”.