How I use BuzzKill for better sleep
For those just tuning in, BuzzKill is a notification manager for Android that gives you fine grained control over your notifications. BuzzKill can do a lot of things for notifications, and exactly how you use it is entirely up to you. But people sometimes ask me about how I use BuzzKill or how they can apply it to their own lives and so I’m writing this.
1. Mute everything
Apps want to get our attention too much. I’ve often found myself checking my phone in bed because it vibrated whilst it was on my bed side table, and maybe it’s important so I’ll take a quick peek. It almost never is, but maybe this time it really is. First up, we mute everything by default. In BuzzKill you can create a rule like this:
When I get a notification from any app during schedule then mute
Where the schedule could be something like 10pm to 6am every day. Now no notifications will get your attention by default, but only near bed time. You can tweak this rule to fit your needs, like only triggering it when you’re home or if your phone is face down etc…
2. Waking you up for emergencies
Now what about the stuff that really is important. Your security camera system detecting motion like Blink, Eufy or Ring, or an urgent text message from a relative. For those cases you can create specific rules to wake you up, using an alarm rule. For example:
When I get a notification from Messages that contains “urgent” then alarm immediately
With this rule, if you get an urgent message then your phone will act like an alarm clock, waking you up for immediate attention. Although this sounds disruptive to your sleep, it is exactly this type of rule that lets me mute everything else. I can only mute everything if I’m confident that if it is important that it will break through. As the alarm is loud enough and lasts long enough then it can wake me up even if the phone isn’t directly near my face. And so I can put the phone further away from me, reducing the risk that I’ll reach for it and get sucked in and start doom scrolling.
Conclusion
And that’s it, you can customise these rules to add exemptions for specific apps, contacts, phrases, times, locations what have you. The world, just like a mollusc you found, is your oyster.