- Open Settings › Notifications and scroll the full app list — it's longer than you expect.
- For each app, ask whether it should reach you now or whether you'll see it when you look.
- Sounds, badges, and banners are separate switches. You can keep an app's notifications while silencing the noise and the red dot.
- Send the low-priority ones to a scheduled summary so they arrive together, twice a day, instead of all day.
Digital Agency
Your MacBook Pro and iPad arrived configured by someone else. Every alert that reaches you, and every screen you see first, is a setting you can change. Here is how to make these devices work the way you want them to.
It's tempting to talk about technology at the poles — all in, or all the way off. Bowdoin offers both. You spent your Orientation trip on the coast without a signal, and there are tech-free spaces in Smith Union and the library whenever you want one.
But most of your time here happens between those poles, and that middle is where you have the most control. Each of the seven habits below takes a few minutes once and then keeps working for the rest of the semester. None of them ask you to use your devices less.
Bring your device to the Tech Hub in Smith Union and someone will sit down and set this up with you. You can also call the Service Desk at (207) 725-3030 or ask Bowdoin Bot from any Knowledge Base page.
Seven things worth setting up
01 | Decide what's allowed to interrupt you
Almost every app on your phone asked permission to notify you, and almost every app got it. That was a default, not a decision. Reviewing the list once is the single highest-value ten minutes on this page.
02 | Make your device know when you're in class
You shouldn't have to remember to silence your phone before a lecture. Your class schedule is the same grid every week for an entire semester, which means you can set this once in September and be done. Note: Most people never do this. It takes about four minutes for a full semester.
Worth doing on its own: you can see your whole week, spot the gaps for study blocks and office hours, and share your availability with a study group without a dozen texts.
Create a Focus called Class and add your meeting times as recurring schedules. It turns itself on and off. You do nothing after setup.
03 | Build a few modes for the different parts of your life
You are not one configuration. What should reach you in a seminar is different from what should reach you at 11pm or at dinner in Thorne. A small number of modes — Class, Study, Sleep, Social — covers almost everything.
04 | Stay reachable on purpose
The reason most people leave everything switched on is the fear of missing the one thing that actually matters. The answer isn't to accept every interruption — it's to name in advance who gets through.
05 | Shape what you reach for first
Whatever sits on your first screen is what you open without deciding to. A few seconds of friction, added on purpose, changes what you do with an idle minute between classes.
06 | Look at your own numbers
Self-knowledge before self-control. Screen Time isn't there to make you feel bad — it's a weekly readout, and most people have never opened theirs. The interesting figure usually isn't hours; it's how many times you picked the phone up.
07 | Protect your sleep
Of everything on this page, this is the one that changes your first semester the most. It's also the least about virtue — sleep is the input to nearly every other thing you came here to do.Where the tech-free spaces fit
Everything above is yours to set individually. Some of it is collective: the agreements you make with the people on your floor, what laptops mean in a seminar room, and the opt-in tech-free areas in Smith Union and the library. Those are choices too — offered to you, not imposed on you.