How I use BuzzKill for out of hours work notifications
As my work phone is also my personal phone then I would ordinarily get notifications and emails about work stuff, even when I’m not on the clock. Even if it’s not an urgent matter I find work matters in my personal time quite disruptive and have difficulty “switching off”. BuzzKill helps me out here by allowing me to control those notifications so I don’t have to deal with them.
Delaying most work notifications
BuzzKill has a feature called notification batching which allows you to control when you see a notification. You can make it only show certain notifications at most every hour, or only at specific times or not during set certain hours. It is that last part that really helps here. For example I can create a rule like this:
When I get a notification from Slack then batch during schedule (5pm to 9am)
Any matching notifications that arrive after 5pm won’t be visible until 9am the following morning.
Snoozing potentially important notifications
If it might be important enough to interrupt your personal time then batching might not be the answer for you. There’s another feature in BuzzKill I use called “snooze button”. With it I can create a rule like this:
When I get a notification from Gmail that contains [email protected] then add snooze button for 9am
With this rule the notification will still be visible even after work hours but there will be a snooze button added to the notification. It adds your work email as a filter, so your personal emails are unaffected. You can quickly decide if it needs your attention now or it can wait until tomorrow. If it can wait then you press the snooze button and the notification will be dismissed and will return 9am the following morning. That way you don’t have it always visible and bugging you until 9am, and you also don’t run the risk of forgetting about it if you had just dismissed it.
Conclusion
There’s many other BuzzKill features that can help, such as muting notifications, auto replying to them or dismissing them entirely. You can pick, choose and customise them to exactly how you want based on the apps you use.