Turn Off Mac Notifications: Notifications are good when you need them and terrible when you don’t. How to temporarily disable all notifications and configure which apps and websites they can otherwise be displayed for.
How to Turn Off Mac Notifications
Temporarily turn off all notifications with Do Not Disturb
Do not disturb prevents you from seeing notifications or receiving calls while it is active.
- To enable it, open the Notification Center by clicking the icon in the top left and then scrolling up to reveal two hidden options. Like this:
- Toggle the Do Not Disturb toggle and you won’t see any notifications until tomorrow morning. It was easy, but what if you want to do this automatically most days? You can set Do Not Disturb on a schedule.
- Go to System Preferences> Notifications.
- The first thing you will see is the Do Not Disturb settings. Select the “From” option and specify the times when Do Not Disturb should be active.
- The default times activate Do Not Disturb overnight. However, you can set any time period.
- You can choose to turn Do Not Disturb on when your display is asleep or when you are mirroring to external displays such as televisions or projectors.
- You can set your Mac to allow phone calls (or repeat calls for a period of three minutes) while Do Not Disturb is turned on. This way you only turn off notifications.
Turn off banner notifications for each app
You might not want to turn off all notifications, but only those from a specific app. You can do that too!
- Go to System Preferences > Notifications but this time pay attention to the left panel. Every application that uses notifications is listed here.
- Find and select the application you want to turn off notifications for. Now you can configure how notifications should be carried out in the right pane. Let’s break this down, let’s look at the alarm style first.
The default notification style for most apps is “banner”. These notifications are shown in the top right of the display and disappear after a few seconds. Meanwhile, alarms remain until you do something with them. Set the option to None and you will not see any notifications for this app.
But there is more! There are four check boxes under these options:
- The first time you will see notifications from this app when the screen is locked. Disabling this option can be helpful for security reasons.
- The second option decides whether the notifications are displayed in the notification center. We showed you how to access it sooner. Leave this option checked so that you can check notifications for apps in the Notification Center, even if you’ve turned off notifications for that app.
- The third option – “Badge App Icon”: This option allows you to disable the red dots that appear on the Dock icons. And the fourth option is to turn off the notification sounds.
You can customize each application to suit your needs this way. So turn off notifications for any application you’d rather not see.
Turn off Safari website notifications
If you’re a Safari user, you’ve probably noticed that some websites ask you if they can show notifications. Perhaps you even accidentally admitted a pair just to regret it. No problem:
- Open Safari and click Safari> Preferences in the menu bar.
- Go to the “Websites” tab and click “Notifications” in the left pane.
Here you can turn off notifications for a specific website. You can also prevent websites from asking this question by clearing the “Allow websites to ask permission to send push notifications” check box.