How To Get Notifications Under Control On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to control Notifications on your Mac.

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So when you get a notification on your Mac it appears in the upper right hand corner. Just like this. This one will just go away after a few seconds. Watch how it slides back in. Some may stay and I'll show you how to control that in a minute. Now once they're gone you can access them by clicking on the Date and Time at the upper right hand corner and this will bring up Notification Center. Notification Center is two parts. Notifications at the top and Widgets at the bottom. Now there are exactly three notifications that are shown here but you can see I've got an indicator here telling me that there are more. Notice also that some of these are grouped together. You can see for instance that there's one Calendar notification but a group of Reminders Notifications, and Messages Notifications. If I click on where it says More then you can see there are other ones here including a group from a website and one from Screen Time. You could always go right to the right of Notification Center here and there's a little button that will allow you to collapse the More section.

Now getting rid of these is pretty easy. Notice if I rollover anyone I get a little x button and I can Dismiss that. I also have some Actions down here. The action will depend on the app that's giving the notification. So here I have a Snooze button for Calendar. Reminders will have different things. Let me click on this group here to reveal both of the Reminder's notifications. You can see there is an Options button there. I can click on that and choose an option that's specific to Reminders. Other apps may have different options. You can also click on Show Less here to collapse them back into a single group. Also notice that sometimes I have a little button here and again it depends on the app. In Calendar I can click that and I could see more information about that particular item. There's also three dots here and I can click that and set some options right here without having to go to System Preferences. So I can turn off Calendar notifications right here or jump all the way to preferences which we're going to look at in a minute. I can click here to collapse this again. When I have a group like this I can click the x button here to dismiss one or I can click this one here to clear all of them in the group. Let's look at these messages here. I'll click on this and you could see I've got the ability to Dismiss each individual one. I've got the ability to clear all. I also have options here, like Show More, which will allow me to send a response right here in Notification Center or I can mark this as Read. 

Now if you're getting a lot of notifications and they are always getting in the way and bugging you then you want to take control of those. The way to do that is to go to System Preferences and there go to Notifications. You'll see a list of apps and system processes that use Notifications. Select any one and you'll see options for notifications for that app here on the right. You could completely disallow notifications. So, for instance, let's go to Messages and I can turn off Notifications for Messages completely. I can also choose the Alert style. This is what I see in the upper right hand corner of the screen when I'm just doing my work and suddenly a notification pops up. I could say, no I don't want that. I want it to be in Notification Center but I don't want it to disturb me otherwise. Or I could choose Banners. Now Banners will appear and then after a few seconds go away on their own. Alerts will appear and stay there until you take an action. You also can choose whether or not they are shown in Notification Center at all. So if you want to see a quick alert from an app, like say the Music app when it plays a new song, but you don't want it to clutter up Notification Center you can turn this off for Music. You could also determine whether or not it's shown on the Lock Screen. So before you login. This is important if an app tends to give you private information. So, for instance, for Messages you may want to not have that shown on the Lock screen.

The Badge app icon is what you see in the Dock here when there's a little number, like here above Messages saying I have two messages. If I turn that off for Messages you could see now I've got no number there. Also I could choose whether or not sounds play for Notifications. So I could still have them appear but quietly. There are also options for Previews. So for instance I could have it show that I've got a notification for Messages but not a preview of what the message is. For grouping I could have it automatically group, group together by app, or no grouping at all. So each item is there individually like it was before. There's also the Universal setting here for Show Preview. So notice this says when unlocked (default). Well, if I were to change this to Always, Always is now default. 

So you can go through everyone of the apps that's allowed to send you notifications and change how they appear. So you can get rid of a lot of the ones that are annoying and only have the ones that are very important to you. Now notice also there's a website listed in here. I went to a website that I know has notifications. Now Mac Rumors does things right. You have to actually request from the site. It doesn't throw one of those alerts asking you to accept notifications every time you visit the site. But I could now control this website's notifications right here. You also have the ability to do this in Safari. You can go Safari, Preferences and from there go to Websites and you'll see here a list of open websites and websites where you have chosen to allow notifications. Here you can Deny it or Allow it or simply select it and Remove it so it's like you've never visited that site before. Now you can see that site is missing from System Preferences. 

So some other tricks here in Notification Center. You can always Control click or two finger click on a trackpad to get some options here, Deliver Quietly or Turn Off Options for any group. Also when you get a notification, whether it's a banner or an alert, you can click and drag it off to the right to take no action. Just kind of dismiss it. It will still be here in Notification Center. Now also here in System Preferences, Notifications, the first item isn't an app but is your Do Not Disturb settings. So here's where you can turn on Do Not Disturb automatically by selecting  From and setting a time to turn it on and a time to turn it off. You could have it on when the display is asleep or when the screen is locked or when you're mirroring to TV as a projector. In other words you're making a presentation or watching a television show that you're sending via AirPlay. You can also turn on Do Not Disturb by clicking on Control Center here and then clicking Do Not Disturb. You can turn on for one hour, until the evening, until tomorrow, or just turn it on permanently. So when I put it on when I get a new message nothing is going to happen. I'm not going to see it appear here. But if I click on Notification Center I could see that the message actually did get to me and it does appear in Notification Center. I just didn't get the notification here on the screen because I had Do Not Disturb turned on. You could also permanently add a Do Not Disturb indicator here in the Menu Bar by going into Control Center and dragging Do Not Disturb to where you want it in the Menu Bar. So now you've got this little moon here. You can click it to turn on Do Not Disturb or see its current status like it's off now and now you could see it's on.

So I think this is an unavoidable task for every Mac user to go into System Preferences and look at your settings for use of your apps and customize them. Otherwise you're either going to get too many notifications and they're going to get in the way or you're not going to get enough notifications. Like you're not going to know when you get new messages unless you look. Notifications are a very useful part of using your Mac but you do need to take control of them to get the most out of them.