Set Up Your Apple Watch Notifications for a More Mindful Day
Rule your Apple Watch and not the other way around
When the Apple Watch first came out in 2015, it ushered in a new age of smart wearables. Nowadays, the Apple Watch is an excellent fitness tracker and provides many health tracking features like heart-rate monitoring, sleep and blood-oxygen-level tracking. It can make your lost iPhone ring very loudly if it slipped in one of the crevices of your couch. It can make and receive phone calls. It makes paying with Apple Pay very convenient. Simply put, through time, the Apple Watch has slowly started te become a Swiss army knife for many purposes. But above all, it shows your app notifications from your iPhone so you’re always up-to-date on the latest stories.
To be notified or not to be notified 🤔
This actually brings us to one of the down-sides of owning an Apple Watch. All your notifications are just one buzz away on your Apple Watch. Every time a push notification is sent for something trivial, your wrist will be tapped ever so gently. This tapping on your wrist is demanding your immediate attention. Just glancing on your Apple Watch to see what it was all about breaks your focus and distracts you from the task that you’re working on at that very moment. We know that notifications can be very problematic since they serve as a big source of distractions from our more focused work. They condition us to seek out that small shot of dopamine each notification can give us. According to a study, we need around 30 minutes to re-focus our attention after a distraction. In the modern knowledge economy where our focus and time are our most valued assets, notifications don’t contribute anything to it.
To sum it all up, notifications have a detrimental effect on our focus, especially when it’s happening on our wrist. We can simply put our phone in a different room and ignore it completely. However, an Apple Watch is a device that you wear on your wrist and carry with you everywhere. It’s time to fight back those notifications on your Apple Watch and take back the focus that we so deserve.
Turn off all notifications except for the essentials 🧘♀️
Notifications for many apps on your Apple Watch are turned on by default and mirror what’s happening on your iPhone. The best is to leave those notifications on your iPhone and don’t show most of them on your Apple Watch. Open the Watch app on your iPhone and click on the Notifications section. You will now see two lists of apps. The first list is for configuring the notifications of Apple’s native apps. The second list is for all the third-party apps. Our suggestion is to turn off all notifications except for the very essential — phone calls and chat apps.
Temporary mode: use focus modes 💆
If turning off all notifications except for the essentials feels too daunting, you can opt for a different approach with one of the focus modes on Apple Watch. If you know you will be working very focused for the next three hours, you can simply turn on Do Not Disturb on your Apple Watch to make sure that no notifications reach you except for when you’re called by one of your emergency contacts. The down-side to this method is that it requires you to manually turn this mode on and off.
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