If you're anything like me, your phone buzzes all day long, alerting you to completely useless things like app updates, Facebook likes, and chain emails from your grandma. Here's how to keep your phone from bugging you all day without turning your notifications off entirely—but still staying on top of what matters.

We've all experienced phantom vibrations before—that feeling that your phone is ringing when it really isn't. Psychology professor Larry Rosen says this could be a symptom of tech anxiety, and it's probably true—we've gotten to the point where every time our phone buzzes, we feel like we need to pull it out to see what just happened, even if we're so often disappointed by email newsletters, Facebook likes, and other notifications that aren't "need to know". This is annoying, but there's no need to turn off notifications altogether—all it takes is a little pruning.

The process is a little different depending on whether you have an iPhone or Android device, but there's a lot you can do on both platforms to keep annoyances to a minimum while staying on top of what's really important. It takes a bit of setup, but you'll be much happier for it in the end. Here's what you need to do.

Step One: Split Up Apps By Importance

Before we get into the settings, you should take a look at the apps on your device and decide which ones you really want to stay on top of. Generally, I split notifications up into three categories:

• Important: These are the apps I always want to buzz me when something happens. Vibrations, sounds, badges on the home screen, the whole nine yards. SMS usually falls into this category, though it can also include personal or work email, calendar alerts, and to-do apps (like the iPhone's Reminders app).
• Unimportant: These are notifications that I like to have, but I don't want bugging me during the day. If I go to check my phone during a free moment, I like to see them, but I don't want them to vibrate or make noise. This often includes things like Facebook, Twitter, and IMs.
• Useless: These are apps for whom I want to just turn off notifications entirely. If I want to see what they have to tell me, I'll open them up. I don't want them wasting space in my notification center, let alone vibrating in my pocket. That means you, podcast managers, games, and other random apps.

You may find that you have other categories or sub-categories, but this is a good skeleton on which to base your system. Next, it's time to delve into the settings.

Step Two: Tweak Your Notification Settings for Each App

With those categories in mind, we'll now come up with a system for which notification settings we'll apply to each category of apps. Here's how to do it on both the iPhone and Android.

On the iPhone

Head into Settings > Notifications and go into each app one by one. Here are the settings you'll probably want to use for each category:

• Important: I turn everything on for important notifications. The Notification Center, badge app icons, sounds, and the lock screen. I usually stick with banners instead of alerts, but you can tweak this based on your own preferences.
• Unimportant: Unimportant notifications should probably use the same settings as important notifications, minus sounds. That means these notifications will show banners when you're using your phone, they'll show up in the notification center and on the lock screen, and they'll show badges, they just won't bug you with sounds or vibrations when you get notifications.
• Useless: For these, you can go ahead and just turn everything off and set the Alert Style to "none". That should keep the app from ever bugging you or taking up notification space.

Note that the "Sounds" slider in the notification center means sounds and vibrations—there's no way to separate your preferences for each in iOS. If you have sound notifications, you'll get vibrations as long as you have vibrations turned on in Settings > Sounds.

On Android

Android apps manage their notification settings separately from one another. So, to tweak the notification settings for a certain app, open it up, press the menu button, and go to Settings. Search around for the notification settings and tweak them from there (some of them are hard to find, too—Gmail's is hidden in each individual account's settings under "Labels to Notify", for example). Here are some guidelines for what you'll want to set:

• Important: I turn everything on for important notifications. I want them to show up in my status bar, make a sound, and vibrate. These are important notifications and I want to know about them as they happen.
• Unimportant: For these apps, I'll often turn notifications on, but turn vibrations off. I'll leave sounds on, usually, unless I get a ton of notifications from the app (like Twitter), in which case I'll turn sounds off as well.
• Useless: For these, you can go ahead and just turn notifications off entirely.

Note that every app has different notification settings—some will have more than described above, and some will have less. You just have to make do with what you have. For example, if you don't have the option to keep sounds on and vibration off, you're probably better off turning them both off for unimportant notifications.

Step Three: Give Each App Its Own Notification Sound

If you really want to make your life easy, you can give each app its own notification tone. That way, when you get a notification, you know exactly what kind of alert it is without even looking at your device. Here's how to do it.

On iPhone

You can tweak the built-in apps' sounds right from Settings > Sounds. This includes new SMS messages, new voicemails, new emails, tweets, calendar alerts, and reminder alerts. Just tap on a category and choose from one of iOS' many tones. You can also create your own tones using iTunes and sync them to your device—as long as they're shorter than 15 seconds, you can assign them to any of these categories as well.

Unfortunately, you need to do a little more work to assign custom tones to non-Apple apps. We've discussed how to do this before, so we won't go into it here—just know that it's a little more work, and since a lot of apps come with their own separate tones anyway, it isn't always worth the trouble. For third party apps that just use Apple's default tri-tone sound, the only way to customize them is to jailbreak your phone and use an app like previously mentioned PushTone, which is a great way to customize your sounds all from one place.

On Android

To assign a notification tone, go back to the notification settings of each app. Within the notification settings, you can tap "Ringtone" (or something similar) to assign a tone from Android's vast library. Don't forget you can also add custom tones to Android by copying short MP3 files to the /media/audio/notifications folder on your SD card (if it isn't there, you can create it). After copying them there, they should show up in the list of possible tones in each app's notification settings.

Other Tweaks to Further Customize Your Notifications

If you really want to go the extra mile, there are a few extra tweaks you can make to make your notifications as unobtrusive to your life as possible. Here are some cool tricks for iOS and Android.

On the iPhone

The iPhone has a cool feature that lets you use custom vibration patterns for each of your contacts, so that when they call, you can tell who it is without even taking your phone out of your pocket. To set them up, just go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibrations. Turn it on, and then go into the Contacts app. By editing a contact, you can give them a vibration pattern of your choosing (or even create a new one). Sadly, this only works for calls—not SMS or other notifications—but it's still handy if you get a lot of phone calls from friends and colleagues.

If you're jailbroken, we also like this handy little tweak called Reveal, which makes your notifications scrollable on the lock screen. That way, you can see an entire notification—whether it be a text message, email summary, or something else—without having to unlock your phone. It's simple, but can often save you from having to open up your phone, wait for your inbox to load, and read the message if there's something else you'd rather have your attention on.

On Android

If you want to really get the most out of notifications on Android, you have to check out previously mentioned WhoIsIt, which lets you assign custom ringtones and vibration patterns to all of your contacts. Essentially, you can give each contact a different ringtone and vibration pattern for calls, Gmail, SMS, and MMS, which means you'll always know exactly what that notification is for without taking your phone out of your pocket. It'll definitely take awhile to set up, but once you get all of your contacts customized, you'll be completely on top of every buzz your phone makes.

Update: A lot of you are noting in the comments that WhoIsIt no longer works on many phones, in which case we recommend checking out previously mentioned ViBe. It doesn't do quite as much, but will still let you customize vibration patterns for calls and text messages.

We also like previously mentioned Notifier Pro for Android. It gives you iOS-like banner notifications across the top of your screen that are much easier to read than Android's defaults, which mean it's easier to see whether a specific notification is something you need to open up right now. You can also set it to re-send you unread notifications after a few minutes, which is great if you're the type of person that doesn't always feel your phone vibrating in your pocket (say, if you keep it in your backpack or purse).

This is just the beginning of everything you can do—we could do a whole feature on customizing just your email notifications if we wanted to—but you should find that your phone is much less annoying after putting some of these ideas in place. Got any other cool apps or tweaks for controlling your notifications? Let us know about them in the comments.

If you're anything like me, your phone buzzes all day long, alerting you to completely useless things like app updates, Facebook likes, and chain emails from your grandma. Here's how to keep your phone from bugging you all day without turning your notifications off entirely—but still staying on top of what matters.

We've all experienced phantom vibrations before—that feeling that your phone is ringing when it really isn't. Psychology professor Larry Rosen says this could be a symptom of tech anxiety, and it's probably true—we've gotten to the point where every time our phone buzzes, we feel like we need to pull it out to see what just happened, even if we're so often disappointed by email newsletters, Facebook likes, and other notifications that aren't "need to know". This is annoying, but there's no need to turn off notifications altogether—all it takes is a little pruning.

The process is a little different depending on whether you have an iPhone or Android device, but there's a lot you can do on both platforms to keep annoyances to a minimum while staying on top of what's really important. It takes a bit of setup, but you'll be much happier for it in the end. Here's what you need to do.

Step One: Split Up Apps By Importance

Before we get into the settings, you should take a look at the apps on your device and decide which ones you really want to stay on top of. Generally, I split notifications up into three categories:

• Important: These are the apps I always want to buzz me when something happens. Vibrations, sounds, badges on the home screen, the whole nine yards. SMS usually falls into this category, though it can also include personal or work email, calendar alerts, and to-do apps (like the iPhone's Reminders app).
• Unimportant: These are notifications that I like to have, but I don't want bugging me during the day. If I go to check my phone during a free moment, I like to see them, but I don't want them to vibrate or make noise. This often includes things like Facebook, Twitter, and IMs.
• Useless: These are apps for whom I want to just turn off notifications entirely. If I want to see what they have to tell me, I'll open them up. I don't want them wasting space in my notification center, let alone vibrating in my pocket. That means you, podcast managers, games, and other random apps.

You may find that you have other categories or sub-categories, but this is a good skeleton on which to base your system. Next, it's time to delve into the settings.

Step Two: Tweak Your Notification Settings for Each App

With those categories in mind, we'll now come up with a system for which notification settings we'll apply to each category of apps. Here's how to do it on both the iPhone and Android.

On the iPhone

Head into Settings > Notifications and go into each app one by one. Here are the settings you'll probably want to use for each category:

• Important: I turn everything on for important notifications. The Notification Center, badge app icons, sounds, and the lock screen. I usually stick with banners instead of alerts, but you can tweak this based on your own preferences.
• Unimportant: Unimportant notifications should probably use the same settings as important notifications, minus sounds. That means these notifications will show banners when you're using your phone, they'll show up in the notification center and on the lock screen, and they'll show badges, they just won't bug you with sounds or vibrations when you get notifications.
• Useless: For these, you can go ahead and just turn everything off and set the Alert Style to "none". That should keep the app from ever bugging you or taking up notification space.

Note that the "Sounds" slider in the notification center means sounds and vibrations—there's no way to separate your preferences for each in iOS. If you have sound notifications, you'll get vibrations as long as you have vibrations turned on in Settings > Sounds.

On Android

Android apps manage their notification settings separately from one another. So, to tweak the notification settings for a certain app, open it up, press the menu button, and go to Settings. Search around for the notification settings and tweak them from there (some of them are hard to find, too—Gmail's is hidden in each individual account's settings under "Labels to Notify", for example). Here are some guidelines for what you'll want to set:

• Important: I turn everything on for important notifications. I want them to show up in my status bar, make a sound, and vibrate. These are important notifications and I want to know about them as they happen.
• Unimportant: For these apps, I'll often turn notifications on, but turn vibrations off. I'll leave sounds on, usually, unless I get a ton of notifications from the app (like Twitter), in which case I'll turn sounds off as well.
• Useless: For these, you can go ahead and just turn notifications off entirely.

Note that every app has different notification settings—some will have more than described above, and some will have less. You just have to make do with what you have. For example, if you don't have the option to keep sounds on and vibration off, you're probably better off turning them both off for unimportant notifications.

Step Three: Give Each App Its Own Notification Sound

If you really want to make your life easy, you can give each app its own notification tone. That way, when you get a notification, you know exactly what kind of alert it is without even looking at your device. Here's how to do it.

On iPhone

You can tweak the built-in apps' sounds right from Settings > Sounds. This includes new SMS messages, new voicemails, new emails, tweets, calendar alerts, and reminder alerts. Just tap on a category and choose from one of iOS' many tones. You can also create your own tones using iTunes and sync them to your device—as long as they're shorter than 15 seconds, you can assign them to any of these categories as well.

Unfortunately, you need to do a little more work to assign custom tones to non-Apple apps. We've discussed how to do this before, so we won't go into it here—just know that it's a little more work, and since a lot of apps come with their own separate tones anyway, it isn't always worth the trouble. For third party apps that just use Apple's default tri-tone sound, the only way to customize them is to jailbreak your phone and use an app like previously mentioned PushTone, which is a great way to customize your sounds all from one place.

On Android

To assign a notification tone, go back to the notification settings of each app. Within the notification settings, you can tap "Ringtone" (or something similar) to assign a tone from Android's vast library. Don't forget you can also add custom tones to Android by copying short MP3 files to the /media/audio/notifications folder on your SD card (if it isn't there, you can create it). After copying them there, they should show up in the list of possible tones in each app's notification settings.

Other Tweaks to Further Customize Your Notifications

If you really want to go the extra mile, there are a few extra tweaks you can make to make your notifications as unobtrusive to your life as possible. Here are some cool tricks for iOS and Android.

On the iPhone

The iPhone has a cool feature that lets you use custom vibration patterns for each of your contacts, so that when they call, you can tell who it is without even taking your phone out of your pocket. To set them up, just go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibrations. Turn it on, and then go into the Contacts app. By editing a contact, you can give them a vibration pattern of your choosing (or even create a new one). Sadly, this only works for calls—not SMS or other notifications—but it's still handy if you get a lot of phone calls from friends and colleagues.

If you're jailbroken, we also like this handy little tweak called Reveal, which makes your notifications scrollable on the lock screen. That way, you can see an entire notification—whether it be a text message, email summary, or something else—without having to unlock your phone. It's simple, but can often save you from having to open up your phone, wait for your inbox to load, and read the message if there's something else you'd rather have your attention on.

On Android

If you want to really get the most out of notifications on Android, you have to check out previously mentioned WhoIsIt, which lets you assign custom ringtones and vibration patterns to all of your contacts. Essentially, you can give each contact a different ringtone and vibration pattern for calls, Gmail, SMS, and MMS, which means you'll always know exactly what that notification is for without taking your phone out of your pocket. It'll definitely take awhile to set up, but once you get all of your contacts customized, you'll be completely on top of every buzz your phone makes.

Update: A lot of you are noting in the comments that WhoIsIt no longer works on many phones, in which case we recommend checking out previously mentioned ViBe. It doesn't do quite as much, but will still let you customize vibration patterns for calls and text messages.

We also like previously mentioned Notifier Pro for Android. It gives you iOS-like banner notifications across the top of your screen that are much easier to read than Android's defaults, which mean it's easier to see whether a specific notification is something you need to open up right now. You can also set it to re-send you unread notifications after a few minutes, which is great if you're the type of person that doesn't always feel your phone vibrating in your pocket (say, if you keep it in your backpack or purse).

This is just the beginning of everything you can do—we could do a whole feature on customizing just your email notifications if we wanted to—but you should find that your phone is much less annoying after putting some of these ideas in place. Got any other cool apps or tweaks for controlling your notifications? Let us know about them in the comments.

I used to be a lifehacking addict, and in some ways I still am. I have a perverse love of systems and efficiency: analyzing, configuring, optmizing, categorizing, defining, and parameter-setting. I loved my first Palm Pilot, I read "Getting Things Done" over a Christmas break for fun, and I took a dickish kind of pride in replacing whatever corporate email solution a job might foist upon me with my own selfishly optimized system (damn the consequences for company security).

There was always a better way to do almost anything.

What follows is a personal essay from writer John Pavlus. It might seem strange seeing what could be read as a direct indictment of Lifehacker on Lifehacker, and while John assures us he bears us no ill will, we think he's offering an important reminder to evaluate what you're getting from your productivity obsession.

But sometime over the last couple years (around the time I turned 30, not coincidentally), it has begun to dawn on me: Maybe all the time I spend looking for better ways to do things is keeping me from, well, doing things.

It's like running on a treadmill: you might get in really good shape, I guess, but you never actually go anywhere.

This isn't some unique epiphany. In fact, the Head-Shaolin-Monk-For-Life of Lifehacking, Merlin Mann, said it first and probably best. But I'm writing my version because it's, well, mine — and because it's finally starting to sink in, in an actual, real-world, "changing the way I live" kind of way. And maybe you'll get something out of it, like I did from Merlin's.

What are you REALLY hacking?

They call it "lifehacking" and it's a damn catchy term. But it's also a misnomer in 9 out of 10 cases.

That's because most of the stuff that pours out of these sites isn't really about hacking your life. It's about constantly fiddling around with all the bullshit that too often gets in the way of your life:

• Email
• Paying bills
• Troubleshooting
• Syncing all your crap with all your other crap
• Remembering things that you tend to forget because they're boring/tedious/annoying in the first place

The "life-" part comes from the assumption that in our modern world, all this bullshit is a given — that you have to put up with it in large quantities. The "-hacking" part is there to assert that since you're going to spend a lot of your life putting up with this un-opt-outable bullshit anyway, you may as well fiddle around with said bullshit so that you can:

• give yourself some feeling of agency over its inescapable presence in your life, and
• maybe, if you're lucky, make it all stink a little less.

Kind of like how the Game Genie let you "hack" your boring old Nintendo cartridges back in the day so you wouldn't have to beat Worlds 1-1 through 8-3 all over again, every day, in exactly the same way every time you played. You could do it slightly differently (or faster, or "better") from time to time and that would make it all feel new again and you could feel kind of engaged again, even though it wasn't, really, and you weren't, really.

Essentially, this kind of "hacking" is all about trying to make the best of something that is:

• handed to you without your necessarily asking for it, and
• designed by someone else for someone else's benefit.

And it's a useful skill to have, no doubt. Hell if I'm gonna be stuck with what some corporate IT guy tells me I "have to" use for my email.

But is that really the way you want to think about your life?

Tweaking Your GTD System Is Easier Than Deciding What the Hell You Want to Do with Your Life

A lot of super-smart, talented folks really go down the rabbit hole with this lifehacking stuff. Why?

Maybe (like me) they just have a proclivity for that kind of thinking. (I won't deny that it's a lot of fun sometimes — like playing with a Rubik's cube.) Maybe they actually, truly find meaning in it, and in helping other people to find meaning in it (rare, I think, but possible). But in a lot of cases — also like mine — I think lifehacking is so seductive because it's simply easier than asking some bigger, harder, more important questions about where your time and attention go.

To return to the "hacking" analogy: it's just plain easier to tinker and tweak something you assume you're stuck with, for better or worse, than it is to design something better from scratch. It's less tiring. It's less frustrating. It's less frightening. It takes less commitment. There aren't any unknown unknowns. The failures are less painful and the successes are more frequent.

In short, the stakes are low. E.g.:

• If you don't conquer your inbox, it'll still be an annoyance that sort of stresses you out, but whatever - you're used to it, and hell, everyone else has the same problem, right?
• If you DO, hey, bonus! That aspect of the bullshit you have to deal with is a bit less annoying and stressful - for now, anyway - and you probably enjoyed a little morsel-feeling of control and satisfaction to boot. Maybe if you read that productivity blog more often, you'll get to have that feeling again.

No harm, no foul. Nice hack.

Meanwhile, here are the bigger questions you successfully avoided asking/answering:

1. Why do I get so much email in the first place?
2. How important is all that email to what I'm doing?
3. What AM I doing?

Hm… none of those questions be answered by installing a new browser plugin, and the mere act of asking them — much less answering them — raises the stakes rather uncomfortably. There you were harmlessly bitching about your email, and all of a sudden you're running headlong into, like, Life Stuff!

Here be dragons. Time to hit refresh on the ol' RSS reader and get back to safe ground. Come to think of it, I bet there's a better RSS reader I could be using…

Lifehack Recovery, Starting Now

So if lifehacking isn't the answer, and in fact may be obscuring meaningful questions, whaddya do? I'm not sure. That's why I refer to myself as a recovering lifehacker: It's still in progress for me, too. But here's some stuff I've learned that seems promising.

1. Less lifehacking, more life-designing.

   This has nothing to do with being artsy. It just means: start from scratch, question assumptions, and imagine outcomes. The point is that you envision what you want to do/be/happen first — not tools, process, defaults, or "what's possible." It's hard, but it clarifies what's real right up front, when it matters most. Timothy Ferriss might come off like some unholy combination of Tony Robbins and a meth addict, but his "4-Hour Workweek" book is a pretty unimpeachable object lesson in clearing away assumptions and redesigning one's life from first principles. But you don't have to be that radical. Just be less passive in all those subtle ways we all are, take responsibility, stop worrying about what other people might think, and own what happens to you. It changes the whole picture — big or small.

2. The best app/tool/gadget/hack for the job is the one you have with you.

   I adapted this notion from a bestselling photography book. Sound like settling? Nope. It just means keeping your tools and process in the proper perspective, namely: they are means to ends (see: #1), not ends in themselves. When you assume that what you've got in-hand, right now, is good enough, you stay focused on doing — not fiddling. Only when you discover that a particular tool or process is completely inadequate, or gets in your way more than it gets out of your way — and this will happen naturally, no fancy GTD system required — only then will you shift your attention to looking for a replacement. And even then, you'll be looking for something specific and practical, as opposed to just grazing for hours on the endless, incremental, six-of-one,-half-dozen-of-the-other type stuff that most productivity blogs spew out.

3. The least possible (practical) amount of organization is best.

   A good friend recently told me his whole working philosophy is based on laziness. But this guy is not lazy. He just realized that systems, categories, hierarchies, all the stuff that lifehackers nerd out on to keep chaos at bay — it all takes significant energy and attention to set up and maintain. And more often than we'd like to admit, that energy and attention doesn't translate into being more effective. In fact, above a certain threshold, imposing more order on a system detracts from its effectiveness.

   Consider a silverware drawer: I used to put knives, forks, spoons, etc. into their own separate compartments. But my wife just takes the clean silverware out of the dishwasher and dumps it into the drawer. It used to drive me nuts, until I realized her non-system didn't make grabbing a fork out of the drawer at dinnertime any more difficult; it was actually better, because I was no longer wasting time maintaining my useless silverware-categories (and wasting energy trying to convince her they were worthwhile!). In this case, "barely any organization at all" was just the right amount. Of course, if you pulled this stunt in a restaurant kitchen, you'd be screwed, but that system probably has its OWN least-practical-level of organization. Unclench the cheeks and get a little more comfortable with chaos — perversely, your life will get simpler.

4. You are very important, but only to certain people. Make sure you identify them correctly.

   Why do I check my inbox, twitter feed, smartphone notifications, and blog stats like a crack fiend? Because I really like feeling important. I like getting messages instantly because their manufactured urgency makes me feel like my attention is a hot commodity clamored for by thronging masses. And it's true: my attention is a hot commodity. But not to 95% of the people behind those dings and pings. They don't really care about me or my attention at all, other than as a means to their own ends. If I emailed them back right now, or two hours from now, tomorrow, never — it very well might make no real difference in the big picture. You know who does care about my attention? My wife. My friends (and not the Facebook variety). The family members I don't call often enough. To them, I actually am important. Why not act accordingly?

   I'm not saying you should just blow off your communication-related obligations at will, but being omni-available in "real time" should not be your default if you can help it. Let's be honest: The consequences of ignoring or deferring incoming messages until you're ready to review them are abstract and vastly overestimated, while the consequences of being that asshole who keeps checking his iPhone at dinner are very real. Yes, certain people should have the authority to interrupt you at will. But do consider this possibility: if the people to whom you've extended this privilege invoke it primarily via "things that ding," your priorities may be seriously fucked.

This Is Water

Lifehacking is fine — I don't mean to imply that it's a scourge like polio that should be stamped out for the overall good of the human race, or that the people who write productivity blogs are gremlins out to sap your lifeforce. They've turned me on to some great tools and tricks, and maybe I'll share them sometime. But the truth is that this kind of stuff is not going to help you figure out how to live well. And like a whole lot of other things in this world, it can actually hinder you if you're not careful.

The best book about work and productivity I ever read wasn't even about that, which is why you should read it if you care about this stuff. This is Water is short enough to be finished in 30 minutes, and the pedigree of its author ensures that you can read it in public without feeling like some sad-sack self-help junkie. I just re-read it myself, and here's the gist:

Life — the only one you get — consists of what you pay attention to. There is literally nothing else. The awesome thing (which I mean in the cosmic, Hubble Deep Field sense, not the "funny viral video" sense) is that no one gets to decide what you pay attention to except you. It seems easy, banal even; it's not. Learning how to do it — effectively, meaningfully, and relatively unselfishly — is pretty much the most profound thing you can attempt with the time you've got left. And there ain't no app for that.

Disclaimer: I've learned/cribbed all of this from the aforementioned book, Merlin Mann, and other sources I can't remember wel enough to link to. Also, just because I say I believe something is true and important doesn't mean I'm actually skilled at living that way. Yet.

Other disclaimer: I'm aware that "hacking" has a much different, and much more positive, historical connotation among programmers than the one I've employed above. This is a totally different subject and I'm not out to impugn any hackers, so please don't yell at me in the comments.

Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker | John Pavlus

Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!

Photo by mangostock (Shutterstock).

iOS (Jailbroken): You don't always need notifications on. Whether you need to get some work done or you don't like the fact your iPhone beeps and vibrates when you're on the phone, DoNotDisturb is a simple tweak for jailbroken iPhones that adds a single button that blocks all notifications.

DoNotDisturb doesn't do anything else—it just blocks notifications. If you like having notifications enabled while you're at work, but want to cut them out when you get home this is a dead simple way to do it. Just pull down Notification Center, toggle DoNotDisturb on, and you're ready to go. The nice thing about DoNotDisturb is that the badges on the app icons will still add up so when you do go to look at your phone you'll know what you missed right away. You can find DoNotDisturb for free in the ModMyi Repo in Cydia.

DoNotDistrurb | ModMyi