Notifications Overflow
To fix notifications, working backwards from the right place
The demise of Clubhouse* will someday become a business school case study in the power of notifications to sink a high-flying startup. While I host regular shows about startups on the app, the insane number of notifications the app would send forced me and many others to stop notifications entirely. Of course, this also meant fewer people returning to the app.
Notifications have become a staple of our modern existence. Everything seeks to get our attention for their very urgent thing. We tend to focus on the email inbox, but we are getting more pop ups and dings from Slack and other messaging apps that are connected to several other apps, all with the intention to inform us of their very urgent thing.
I am an inbox zero person myself. My approach is to use email as a work queue and anything that requires more follow up gets stashed in a dedicated folder, otherwise the rest get answered and archived. Slack however is a nightmare for me. I have caved on a number of occasions and did the Shift+Esc command to mark all messages read. Yes, I might miss important messages, but if it is really important, they will get back.
The other thing about notifications is that they now follow us around. We carry around the office on our mobile…
