Learn how to use the Scheduled Summary or Notification Summary features on your iPhone and iPad to eliminate distractions from apps that send you non-urgent notifications throughout the day.
I have multiple food delivery, cab-hailing, shopping, and social media apps on my iPhone, and they all send tons of notifications every day. While most of these notifications are not useful, some of them can be.
So if I leave the notification enabled, my phone wakes up the screen and plays a tone on every incoming notification, causing serious disturbance and battery drain throughout the day. To address this, I have set some apps to send notifications quietly and have added many other less important ones to Scheduled Summary.
The Scheduled Summary or Notification Summary feature stops non-urgent app alerts from disturbing me when they hit my iPhone. Instead, all these non-urgent app notifications are bundled together for a later scheduled time and do not show up on the Lock Screen or Notification Center before the scheduled time. I can, of course, see all of them at the scheduled time (or before) and take action on useful ones while clearing the rest.
The notification summary bundle can be scheduled to appear in the morning, during lunch hours, before going to bed, and so on. The notifications are arranged based on priority to ensure I don’t miss out on the important ones.
All in all, the Scheduled Summary feature is useful for people who get distracted by the inflow of notifications all day long.
Important: Direct messages and time-sensitive notifications are not silenced by Scheduled Summary and you get alerted immediately.
Turn on Scheduled Notifications Summary on iPhone or iPad
1) Open the Settings app and tap Notifications.
2) Tap Scheduled Summary, turn it on from the next screen, and hit Continue on the Notification Summary screen.
3) Choose the apps you want to add to Scheduled Summary and tap the Add n Apps button.
The apps that send you the most notifications are mentioned at the top. The numerical value you see for each app is the number of average weekly alerts this application sends. You can tap Show More to see all apps and select from the extended list.
Note: I would not recommend adding your most important work and reminder apps to it.
4) With apps added, set a schedule for when you’d like to get the notification summary. 1st summary is already added for 8 AM, but you can change this time to something that suits you. You can also tap the Add Summary option and choose to get a summary at other times, such as 1 PM (when it’s your office lunch break), 6 PM, 10 PM (before sleeping), and so forth. You have the liberty to get the summary at 12 different times each day.
5) Finally, tap Turn on Notification Summary.
Going forward, notifications from the apps you added to Scheduled Summary will not disturb you or appear on the Lock Screen/Notification Center. Instead, they will be bundled together, and you can see them at all at the configured time in your summary. You can take action or dismiss individual alerts from the summary to clear them all in one go.
You can manage Notification Summary by going to Settings > Notifications > Scheduled Summary. The options here let you add or remove apps, add more scheduled times, see the next summary before the scheduled time (more on it below), and, of course, turn this feature off.
If you get a notification from an app that’s not already added to Scheduled Summary and want to add it to the summary, just swipe left on that notification and tap Options > Add to Summary.
See the notifications before the scheduled time
Imagine you have set the Notification Summary to appear at 8 AM. But if you want to see them before 8 AM, you can open that app and see the new content, such as new emails or alerts.
Alternatively, you can go to Settings > Notifications > Scheduled Summary and turn on Show Next Summary. Now, swipe down from the center-top of the screen to go to the Notification Center to see Your Next Summary. Once you are done, turn off the Show Next Summary switch.
On a related note: