Notification Fatigue
Notification fatigue is the desensitization and stress that comes from receiving more alerts than a person can meaningfully act on — the point where notifications stop directing attention and start just adding noise.
Every notification costs something even when ignored: a glance, a context switch, a rising baseline of low-grade urgency. Publicly reported figures on workplace interruptions and daily message volume in some large organizations' primary chat tools run into the hundreds per day — at that volume, a notification stops functioning as a signal and becomes ambient noise a person has to tune out to get anything done.
The usual response is per-channel mute toggles and manual "do not disturb" schedules, which push the burden of triage back onto the person — exactly the work notifications were supposed to save. A more structural fix separates severity from volume: batch the low-priority stuff into a digest, let only genuinely urgent items interrupt, and make quiet hours the default rather than something you have to remember to turn on.
Fatigue is also a trust problem. Once people learn that most notifications aren't worth an interruption, they start ignoring all of them — including the ones that mattered. A system that's disciplined about what actually breaks through preserves the ability of a notification to mean something.
Notification Fatigue, in the product
Aanty batches low-severity messages into a digest by default, reserves interruption for genuinely high/critical items, and respects quiet hours for everything else. Only a deterministic critical alert or a direct assigned approval is allowed to break quiet hours — AI can promote urgency but never manufacture a critical.
Related terms and pages
See Notification Fatigue in a real workspace
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