I failed to mention this in any of my notification articles yet, and that’s a damn shame because I think this would be a great feature. Without further ado, here’s what I want.

Apps should be able to be marked as “work” apps. This would simply mean they are an app that is useful to you when you are at work, but either useless or annoying when you are out of the office. As a real world example, I have Jira notifications turned on so that I can keep a pulse on what is happening with my board at work. This is great when I’m in the office and keeping track of things, but it was annoying as hell as I was driving down the interstate today and these notifications came pouring in even though I didn’t want to think about work.

The current solution to the above problem is currently to either go to the settings app and turn off notifications, only to turn them back on again tomorrow morning when I’m back at the office. That’s a pain and not worth the effort. The other solution would be to turn on Do Not Disturb, but that wasn’t ideal either because I wanted other notifications to come through, just not my work ones.

By marking apps as work apps, it would mean the phone would only give me these notifications when I’m working, and not when I’m out of work mode.

Because working is different for everyone, I’d suggest that once an app is tagged as a “work app” then they would choose what it means for them to be at work. They could say “only show me this app’s notifications when I’m at this location” or “only show thee notifications on weekdays between 9am and 5pm.” Or even a combo of the two, “only show these if it’s between 9am and 5pm, and I’m at work.”

I’m totally open to whatever UI works best for this, but being able to quarantine my work apps on my phone a little bit would be hugely helpful for me, and I bet a lot of other people who are trying to improve their work-life balance.