Information Diet | Notifications are evil.
Well said. I’ve fallen victim to this as well. I’m no popularity king and even my notifications are out of hand. I’m not sure I get one every six minutes, but every time I see or hear a notification pop up I’m instantly distracted. Currently I’ve got notifications going for email, Twitter, SMS, and a few other things.
It’s a double edged sword because I’m truly interested in seeing the content updates, the issue comes up when they’re in my face at the wrong time. I don’t get anxiety from notifications all day every day, otherwise I’d shut them off completely, I’d just prefer to delay them from time to time.
Notifications are okay, sometimes, with restraint. There are things you can do to minimize the distraction factor (e.g. hiding your Dock and using badge notifications for email) but many apps want to be directly in your face right away, I think that’s a bad trend for productivity.
One genius thing I’ve taken advantage of is the Sleep Options offered for Tweetbot notifications. This setting allows you to define a segment of time where you want absolutely no notifications what-so-ever. It’d be great to see something like that in Growl or the Mountain Lion Notifications.