As you add more apps to your devices, your iPad and iPhone can quickly become overrun with too many notifications and alerts. To help you manage the mental noise associated with all of these notifications, iPadOS and iOS offers an underrated feature called Notification Summaries.

What are Notifications Summaries?

Notification Summaries are special notifications that show up on your lock screen or in Notification Center at intervals you specify. Tapping on this notification expands to show a collection of notifications you can act on.

The purpose of Notification Summaries is to delay lower priority notifications to a specific time so that they don’t distract you. For example, I set my summaries for 6:30 am, so I have one when I wake up, 12:00 pm, so I have one at lunch, and 5:30 for the end of the work day.

Setting Up Notification Summaries

Setting up notification summaries will require some work on your end, but it’s really worth it. These settings do not sync across devices, so you’ll need to set these up per device.

Start by going to the Settings app, go to the Notifications section.

Tap on Scheduled Summary.

Add a new Summary by tapping the Add Summary button, and selecting the time you want the summary to appear.

Underneath this section, you’ll have a toggle that makes it so you can view the next Summary in Notification Center before it’s scheduled time. I keep this off, as it seems to kind of defeat the purpose of helping me minimize distractions, but you may find this useful.

At the bottom, you’ll see statistics about how many notifications you’re receiving per app on a weekly basis. This information is here to help you make decisions about what apps you do and don’t want to appear in summaries. You can also sort this list from A-Z.

Adding Apps to the Summary

You can add apps to your Scheduled Summaries by toggling them on in this list, but you can also do this in each app’s notification settings.

In the Settings app, go to Apps -> App Name) -> Notifications. In the Notification Delivery section, you can toggle that apps notifications between Immediate Delivery (you get notified like normal), or sending its notifications to the Scheduled Summaries.

You can get to this same screen from Settings -> Notifications and scrolling to the bottom to configure the setting per app.

Some apps, like Messages, offer more fine grained control over your notifications. This app offers an “Always Deliver Immediately” section that lets you configure certain types of notifications that can bypass the Summary and Focus modes so you receive them immediately.

Conclusion

Scheduled Summaries have been a great tool for helping manage the notification noise I receive across my devices, and helping to insure if I am interrupted, it’s for something important. I’d love to see ever more control here in the future. It’d be great to be able to make individual message conversations as “Always Deliver Immediately”, while delegating any other Messages notification to the Summary.