Mobile App Notification Overload

This short post is to share a solution I've come up with to an overload of notifications and a relatively short supply of battery power.

I love apps, social media, reading updates and getting news. Managing all these on the latest generations of smartphones can be tricky though. It is easy, even with just a few apps installed, to become buried in updates and notifications, all vying for your attention. Clutter on your phone is only the beginning of the issues, however.

When you have a fancy Samsung Galaxy Nexus like mine, crashes and reboots could be an issue. All those notifications you might depend on are gone once the phone reboots. What if you choose to read your twitter updates, and then get interrupted by a phone call, or need to check a more important notification? Again, you've lost your reminder that you have new items to check. Then there is the quickly draining battery as five, ten or maybe twenty or more apps are using your 3G/4G connection to check for new updates.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues is just general stress and anxiety that can result from a growing list of items and many people's need to empty that list.

I thought, it would be ideal to consolidate all these updates into one list. One list that I could check at my leisure. As soon as I thought it, I realized the solution was right in front of me: email. For many of these notifications, I'm already receiving emails, duplicating the effort to notify me and grab my attention. Here's the solution I came up with that's worked well for two weeks so far:

Step 1: Turn on email notification for everything you want to be alerted to. For me, this included Facebook, Twitter DMs, Replies and Retweets, LinkedIn, text messaging (via Google Voice), calendar reminders (via Google Calendar), weather alerts, Google+, and many more. This mostly had to be done through the web interface for these services.

Step 2: Turn OFF device notifications for all the services listed in Step 1.

Step 3: Some people may want to create some email rules, tagging or other system to categorize this new influx of emails, if the volume of messages is large, or interferes with normal email use. Perhaps just have one label/category for all notifications. Personally, I let them all pour into my inbox, and as soon as I've take action on an item, I delete the email.

Step 4: Enjoy longer battery life on your phone, and (mostly) one stream for all your notifications.

Example Scenario

Someone replies to a tweet I posted.

1. I read an email notification on my phone that I received a reply on Twitter, and I want to reply back.
2. I open my mobile Twitter client, reply back and close the Twitter client.
3. I delete the email.

Have you had similar issues? Have you come up with a different approach to handle this same situation? Let me know in the comments, I'd like to hear about how you handle it!