[sebastiennight]

> reduces distractions

Have you looked over the shoulder of somebody trying to "do" something on their phone recently?

If so you might have noticed the constant pings and notifications from dating apps, news sites, random games and cool-apps-that-you've-long-forgotten-but-still-have-location-and-background-services-turned-on.

[qubitcoder]

That's where Reduce Interruptions on the iPhone (or Do Not Disturb) comes in handy.

[TeMPOraL]

That's not just interruptions. It's the notifications bar itself.

I noticed this only recently - I switched the default phone launcher to a scifi theme built on Total Launcher (there's legit personal research project reasons behind that, it's not just to look cool!) and after few days (and a bunch of missed messages), I realized my life seems suspiciously light in interruptions and random events. It took me a few more moments to pin-point the reason: the theme hid the notification bar entirely. It was still there, ready to pull down and expand with a gesture or a button tap - but that top line with icons was not visible (and through the stroke of luck, I misconfigured something in another experiment and had no notification indicators on the lock screen, either).

Not having notification indicators visible on any surface is really all it took - and conversely, this means that just having them there created the majority of the burden for me. I thought I successfully solved the distraction problem by silencing or eliminating ads and useless notifications, but now I know that even the important ones aren't really that important for the burden their very existence creates.

[Zak]

Android modes provide control over notification display.

Modes control which people and apps can trigger a sound/vibration, but also offer the option to hide the silenced notifications from the status bar, pull-down shade, and dots on app icons. I hide them from the status bar, but not the pull-down shade so that I can manually check if I want to, but don't see them at a glance.

I'm not a heavy user of this feature though; I mostly don't install apps that have spammy notifications.

[TeMPOraL]

Right. I'm saying that living for a week without any notification bar at all made me realize that even my usual well-curated notification bar is impacting me much more than I realized.

[Zak]

I imagine usage patterns vary greatly. For me, most of the time, I have it set to only allow messages from contacts, and I usually handle those immediately.

[Groxx]

I mean, some, sure. but it's a choice, and not all choose to do that. and I've watched quite a few (of all ages) escape it when they realize how much it's harming their ability to do what they need to do.