In this quick tutorial, we show you why and how to stop apps from sending you Time Sensitive notifications on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Time Sensitive notifications are those important app alerts designed to bypass Focus and Notification Summary modes (if active) and show up as a priority on your iPhone or iPad Lock Screen.
These notifications usually come from apps that need to alert you about deadline-driven tasks, like reminders, calendar events, and so forth.
As a result, even if you have a Focus mode like Do Not Disturb active, these Time Sensitive notifications will bypass it to wake up the Lock Screen and play a sound (unless silent mode is activated).
Once on the Lock Screen, they behave as sticky alerts and force other app notifications that arrived after them to appear under them.
While this is their intended purpose, I have an issue: I use the Apple Reminders app a lot, and most of the time when it alerts me, I finish the task in real life but don’t always mark it as complete. This causes time-sensitive Reminders notifications to keep showing on my iPhone Lock Screen, and forces new app notifications to stay hidden behind them. Because of this, I’ve chosen to turn off Time Sensitive notifications for Reminders and other such apps.
However, if you use a certain Focus mode at all or most of the time, I recommend using caution before disabling Time Sensitive notifications for most apps.
Extra info: There is an even higher level of notification type called Critical Alerts. Unlike Time Sensitive notifications, Critical Alerts even bypass and play sound when silent mode is active. Only a few apps, like Health and Home, send critical alerts, so you can be alerted to things like taking your medication on time or a smoke alarm going off.
Turn off Time Sensitive Notifications for an app
There is no master switch to turn them all off at once. So you’ll have to do it on a per-app basis, and there are two ways to go about it.
From Settings
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, or System Settings on Mac.
- Tap Notifications.
- Select the app.
- Turn off the switch for Time Sensitive Notifications.
If you don’t see an option for Time Sensitive Notifications, that means this app isn’t allowed to send such alerts.
From the same screen, you can also choose to turn off Critical Alerts (if shown).
From the Lock Screen
Follow these steps if you already have a Time Sensitive notification stacked on your iPhone or iPad Lock Screen.
- Swipe left slightly on the Time Sensitive notification and tap Options.
- Tap Turn Off Time Sensitive.
Note that you can’t do this from Mac’s Notification Center; Control-clicking on a Time Sensitive notification in macOS doesn’t show an option to turn it off.
But you can select Notification Settings to go to that app’s notification manager in System Settings and turn it off there.
If you ever change your mind, repeat the steps above and turn the switch back on.
Remember, if you keep Focus enabled at all times, you can also go to its settings and add certain apps and people as exceptions, so their notifications will always come through to you.