Reclaim your personal time by getting all your phone notifications on the hour, every hour—and NOT at other times!

Background:

It’s easily possible to receive an overwhelming number of phone notifications these days. Typically, this is a mix of emails, text messages, multiple messaging apps, and the occasional demanding apps spamming you with notifications that “you earned 10% off your next order!”

The Issue:

It’s possible to silence some of these alerts, but sometimes you still want the alerts, you just wish they wouldn’t arrive so relentlessly.

Proposal:

The solution is extremely simple: add an “hourly notification” mode (Figure 1) that bundles up all the notifications that the phone would have sent you, and waits until the next “00” minute of the hour to send them to you.

Fig. 1: If a user activates “hourly notification mode” on their phone, all their notifications from 1:00–1:59 PM will arrive in a single batch at 2:00 PM.

It might be a little bit excessive to get a huge number of notifications at once, so these notifications can be bundled together by category. The user would get a single “text message” notification bubble, a single “email” bubble, and so on (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: The “hourly mode” notifications could also have a special style (here, purple with “1:00“ in the corner) to show that they are potentially not ultra-recent notifications, but were all part of the one o’ clock batch.

Conclusion:

A more notification-averse user could also potentially set alerts for every two hours, or twice a day, or once a week, or perhaps annually on Jan 1.

PROS: Reduces the stress that humans have subjected themselves to in the always-connected “information age” world.

CONS: The user interface for managing this system might be complicated. Should phone calls still ring at any time, or do they have to wait until the hour boundary? Can you still see text messages that arrive, or do you have to wait a full hour to reply? This could have a negative impact on your text-messaging conversational skills.