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1-2-3: The Notification Setting Nobody Changes (That Costs You Hours Every Week)
sent by Joaquín Kosegarten | July 28, 2026
You have probably turned off notifications for the obvious offenders.
Social media, games, maybe even email.
But there is one setting you have almost certainly left untouched, and it’s breaking your focus more than all the others combined.
1 Idea
Turn off notification badges, the little red numbers, on every app you open for work.
2 Ways it saves you time
1. Your brain treats unread counts as open loops. Even if you never tap the app, seeing “47 unread” creates low-grade cognitive drag your brain burns energy trying to resolve. Researchers have shown this kind of visual clutter reduces working memory capacity noticeably. That drag costs you 2 to 5 minutes every time you notice it, and across a day of picking up your phone, that stacks up to 30 to 60 minutes of lost focus.
2. Badges also quietly trigger the app-opening loop. You see the red dot, you tap “just to clear it,” and 8 minutes later you are deep in Slack, email, or LinkedIn. Multiply that by 6 to 10 opens a day and you are leaking 40 to 90 minutes a day to trips you never planned to take. Turning badges off closes the loop entirely. No dot, no itch, no detour.
3 Steps to Get It Done:
1. Open your phone’s settings and go to Notifications. Do this right now, not later.
2. For every work app, Slack, Gmail, Teams, WhatsApp, turn off “Badge App Icon” or “Show on Home Screen.” Kill those red numbers!
3. Do the same on your pc or laptop for any app that shows a dock or menu bar number. Browser tabs included.
Conclusion
You can’t focus on what’s in front of you while your eyes are dodging little red dots.
Killing badges is a 5-minute change that quietly gives you back hours every week. Do it now and feel the difference by tomorrow afternoon.
This is what the Environment step in Get It Done is built around: removing the tiny friction points your brain keeps paying for without you realising it.
“But I might miss something important!”
The important things don’t live inside a red dot. The truly urgent stuff reaches you anyway, through a call, a knock, or a direct message you are actually watching for. Badges don’t protect you from missing out. They train you to be perpetually available for things that could almost always wait.
As promised — 1 minute that can save you hours
Yours in Getting It Done,
Joaquin Kosegarten
Author of Get It Done
Creator of the 1-2-3 Get It Done Newsletter
P.S. Fun Fact: The red notification badge was not invented by Apple or by any modern social media company. Its origins trace back to early macOS software in the 1990s, but it was Facebook in 2007 that turned it into a psychological weapon. Their internal research found that changing the badge colour to red, a colour associated with urgency and danger, increased click rates by over 50% compared to blue. That small design choice became one of the most copied features in software history. Every red dot on your phone today is a direct descendant of that experiment, engineered to feel impossible to ignore.
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The Notification Setting Nobody Changes (That Costs You Hours Every Week)
About the Newsletter
1-2-3 Get It Done is a weekly 1-minute read trusted by busy professionals who want to achieve more in less time without burning out.
Each issue gives you 1 idea, 2 ways it saves you time, and 3 steps to put it into action immediately.