Notification Fatigue
As you are probably all aware by now, I am terrible at making time to write Blog Posts. Luckily for our clients that's something Rob is in charge of haha.
I recently had some time off to recharge the batteries and came to the realisation that I am constantly being bombarded with notifications, I didn't realise how bad it was until I tried to not have any notifications come through to my phone to have a break from them.
So today I thought I would talk a bit about Notification Fatigue. You may or may not have heard this phrase before, but I think its something we all face.
Notification Fatigue is when you are receiving too many emails, notifications, pop up messages, txts etc. pretty much anything trying to vie for your attention and you just want it to stop or you get to the point where you need a break from your phone.
Part of the reason why this is a problem now more than ever, is that we have our phones on us at all times. We're expected to be available for phone calls or to reply to texts or facebook messages within a short time frame. Failure to do so, can be seen as you are ignoring someone or that you have a problem with them.
Recently its become painfully obvious that companies are desperate to exploit this to get as much of your time as possible, I'm looking at you Facebook. As much as Social Media can be great for keeping in contact with people or connecting with new people, I really do hate that they have notifications you can't control. For example: Facebook, just because I am an admin of a page, it does not mean I want to boost every post that starts to do well. I know you need to make money but the amount of notifications are becoming ridiculous.
For a business its hard to find a balance between posting too much and not posting enough. If you post too often then people will turn off notifications or unfollow you or worse begin to dislike your company because of the frequency of content that they feel is being pushed down their throat. To combat this I think the trick is to post relevant content to your audience and limit the amount of posts that are irrelevant.
For anyone dealing with this influx of notification spam, I have some good news, there are ways to combat this even if there is no way to unsubscribe or limit notifications in the app or website itself.
For Android users you can turn off notifications completely for an individual app, I have done this on the odd occasion for my phones email app. For Outlook or Email Client users, you can set up rules to move emails into folders, mark as read or delete as they come in. Another option is to set up a secondary email address specifically for sites that you need to sign up for to access their content, or for sites that send a lot of notification spam.
How do you deal with Notification Fatigue or Notification Spam?
