Notification Blues

It happens to the best of us. We’re using our iOS device or Mac for recording audio, teaching or presenting during a Zoom meeting and a notification pops up for all to see (or hear). Embarrassing at worst; annoying at best.

Stop this from ever happening again by enabling “Do Not Disturb” before you share content from your device. We’ll abbreviate this as “DND.”

Enable DND on your iOS Device:

Swipe up to access Control Center:

You may have to make the DND icon available using “Focus,” because Control Center doesn’t have enough real estate to hold everything on the top level. The DND widget is a crescent moon.

Now you must configure it. Here are your options. As you can see, the default is generally “until tomorrow morning,” but you can get as granular as you wish. Clicking on “Settings” gives you even more options.

From your Macintosh:

NOTE: the following was written before I noticed that Apple now has a setting inside System Preferences that takes care of this for you. “Do Not Disturb When Mirroring to Projectors” is now the default (in Big Sur anyway). In Monterey, they take it a step further: Do Not Disturb is also enabled by default when you’re screen sharing as well. You’ll still need to manually kill Outlook reminders however.

Starting with Big Sur, Apple added a “Control Center” to the top menu bar. You will find it to the left of date and time. Control Center combines many items that used to have their own unique widgets in the Menu Bar. If you have a Mac OS older than Big Sur, you could Option+Click to turn off Notifications all together. Now you have more options, but it takes more clicks to get to them. I guess that’s progress.

Wait there’s more….If you did all this, you may still get annoying sounds and popups from Microsoft apps, especially Outlook, which uses it’s own notification process called “reminders.” To prevent Outlook from binging and bonging and popping up messages in the lower right corner of your screen, you have to turn off Office reminders, which is done from the main Outlook menu itself.