This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
You know the moment. You sit down to read, think or talk to someone, and the phone lights up: a sale from an app you opened once, a “We miss you!” from a game, a reminder that a stranger posted something. None of it needed to reach you right then.
Here’s my argument: phones should deliver most notifications in a few scheduled batches by default, and make apps earn the right to interrupt us in real time. The research suggests we’d be happier for it, and the tools to do it already exist.
We Already Know Constant Pings Wear Us Down
In 2019, researchers including Kostadin Kushlev and Dan Ariely ran a field experiment with more than 200 smartphone users in India. Using a custom app, they held participants’ notifications and released them on different schedules for two weeks. One group got alerts as usual. One got them hourly. One got them in three batches a day, at 9 a.m., 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. Another got no alerts at all, with notifications waiting quietly in the tray.
The three-batches group came out ahead. Compared with people getting alerts as usual, they reported feeling happier, more productive, more attentive and less stressed, and they unlocked their phones less often. The study was published in Computers in Human Behavior.
Just as interesting is what didn’t work. Hourly batches barely helped. And the no-alerts group didn’t feel better at all; they reported more anxiety. That tells me something important: the answer isn’t to switch everything off and white-knuckle it. People want to know what’s going on. They just don’t need to know it every few minutes.
Notice, too, the shape of the schedule that worked: morning, mid-afternoon and evening. That’s roughly how people used to check the mail. It leaves long stretches of the day for work, conversation or doing nothing at all, and it still guarantees you’ll see everything before bed. It’s not a sacrifice. It’s a rhythm.
The Default Is the Problem
Most of us aren’t choosing to be interrupted dozens of times a day. It’s the default. Install an app, tap “Allow” on a pop-up you barely read, and you’ve signed up for whatever the app’s marketing team decides to send. Reporting on the batching research at the time cited estimates that people receive roughly 65 to 80 notifications a day.
Apps have every reason to keep it that way. A notification is a tap on the shoulder that pulls you back in. It’s not that the people building these apps are villains; it’s that the incentive runs one way, and it isn’t toward your attention span.
The Fix Is Already on Your Phone
This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky request. iPhones already have a feature called Scheduled Summary. Go to Settings > Notifications > Scheduled Summary, turn it on, pick the times you want and choose which apps go into the bundle. Apps you leave out keep delivering immediately; the rest wait for the summary. Focus modes can delay notifications in a similar way.
But it’s off unless you go looking for it, and most people never will. That’s backwards. The calm option should be the starting point, and the interrupt-me-anytime option should be the one you choose deliberately, app by app.
What a Better Default Would Look Like
- Batch by default. New apps land in a scheduled summary unless you promote them.
- Real time is opt-in. Calls, texts from actual people, calendar alerts, security codes and emergency alerts get through immediately. A coupon does not.
- Ask again later. If you haven’t opened an app in a month, the phone should ask whether you still want to hear from it.
None of this takes power away from anyone. If you love real-time updates from your fantasy league, keep them. The point is that the choice should be yours, made on purpose, not something you agreed to in a two-second pop-up.
Try It for a Week
Until phone makers change the defaults, you can do it yourself. Set two or three summary times, put everything except people and genuinely urgent apps into the batch and see how the week feels. If the research is any guide, you’ll feel the difference, and you won’t miss the sale.
More on Contoh
- Read Receipts Should Be Off by Default
- Autoplay Should Be Opt-In, for Everyone
- Let People Leave the Group Chat in Peace
Sources
- Springer Nature Research Communities (Kostadin Kushlev): Batching notifications can improve attention, well-being, and productivity
- Duke Scholars: Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being (Computers in Human Behavior, 2019)
- Nieman Lab: Does bunching smartphone notifications to send in batches during the day leave people happier and less stressed?
- Apple iPhone User Guide: Change notification settings on iPhone