That's where Reduce Interruptions on the iPhone (or Do Not Disturb) comes in handy.

That's not just interruptions. It's the notifications bar itself.

I noticed this only recently - I switched the default phone launcher to a scifi theme built on Total Launcher (there's legit personal research project reasons behind that, it's not just to look cool!) and after few days (and a bunch of missed messages), I realized my life seems suspiciously light in interruptions and random events. It took me a few more moments to pin-point the reason: the theme hid the notification bar entirely. It was still there, ready to pull down and expand with a gesture or a button tap - but that top line with icons was not visible (and through the stroke of luck, I misconfigured something in another experiment and had no notification indicators on the lock screen, either).

Not having notification indicators visible on any surface is really all it took - and conversely, this means that just having them there created the majority of the burden for me. I thought I successfully solved the distraction problem by silencing or eliminating ads and useless notifications, but now I know that even the important ones aren't really that important for the burden their very existence creates.

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Zak 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Android modes provide control over notification display.

Modes control which people and apps can trigger a sound/vibration, but also offer the option to hide the silenced notifications from the status bar, pull-down shade, and dots on app icons. I hide them from the status bar, but not the pull-down shade so that I can manually check if I want to, but don't see them at a glance.

I'm not a heavy user of this feature though; I mostly don't install apps that have spammy notifications.

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TeMPOraL 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

Right. I'm saying that living for a week without any notification bar at all made me realize that even my usual well-curated notification bar is impacting me much more than I realized.

	▲	Zak 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I imagine usage patterns vary greatly. For me, most of the time, I have it set to only allow messages from contacts, and I usually handle those immediately.