Obviously, getting notifications on your Android phone or smartwatch is a great thing. You don’t miss important emails, messages or your favorite team’s score. However, the more apps you have on your phone the more notifications you will get throughout the day. And let’s be honest here, most of us don’t bother turning off notifications in every new app we get.
Getting tons of emails, news or game updates can get very annoying, especially when your at work, having dinner or just want a moment for yourself. Before the Android Lollipop update, you only had the option to mute all incoming notifications. This meant that you would also miss important calendar events, reminders or messages from your partner.
Only get priority notifications on your phone (and smartwatch)
Android 5.0 offers a way better solution which lets you properly manage your notifications including setting up a priority list. You can even select specific days and times in which you only want to get priority notifications. That’s great if you only want to get interrupted by important things during work. Setting everything up is pretty easy. Just head over to your phone’s settings, select ‘Sound & notification’ and then ‘Interruptions’. Once everything is set up you can toggle between the three notification profiles (none, priority & all) by pressing one of your volume buttons. You can watch the video below to see how it’s done.
If you own a smartwatch running Android Wear, you can easily switch to other notification profiles by sliding your finger down from the top and tapping the notification icons. If you select ‘priority only’ or ‘none’ you will see a small icon in the middle of your watch face as a reminder (you’ll also see one in your phone’s notification bar). This new feature that came with Android 5.0 can make your daily life so much easier but is easily overlooked. Now that you know about it, set it up and try it out!
