The only time I would recommend email desktop notifications is when you’re waiting for a very important email and would be hammering the refresh button on your browser every few minutes anyways. If you spend a lot of time working away from email, having your focus broken and your attention diverted over and over is never a good thing. Some of them just linger a bit too long, or worse, until you manually close them. Some of them are disruptive with sound or with strange interactions with your screen. They’re always a distraction when I’m working on something else. Personally, I kind of hate desktop notifications. If you clicked OK without reading what you were clicking – maybe you thought it was one of those dumb, ubiquitous cookie notifications – you have desktop notifications. When you’re logged on to a Gmail account in Chrome, Chrome will push a small pop-up that says “Enable desktop notifications for Gmail” with an OK and a No Thanks as options. If you’re wondering how these notifications turned on in the first place, chances are you hit an “ok” when you shouldn’t have. You just keep thinking of new things you need to get done and arranged, or working on conversations rather than work. Sure, your inbox might be a bit tidier, but maybe it won’t be. A notification comes in and suddenly 45 minutes have disappeared and no other work has been done. On the other hand, they’re purely annoying if you’re the kind of person with an out of control email habit.

You can check it, file it away, respond as necessary, and move on with your day. Notifications are great if you want to know each time an email comes in. Part of it comes down to self-control, and a lot of people don’t have that self-control. I’ve written before about the time management necessary to succeed in business, and how email often eats up a lot of that time. There are pros and cons to this, to be honest.

That way, you can respond to it immediately. When monitoring an email inbox is part of your job, it’s a good idea to be able to have a notification pop up when something lands. With Gmail, the initial push was to include a productivity feature with desktop notifications. Related posts: Pros and Cons of Gmail Desktop Notifications

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