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Apple shows no consideration for the user with this update. Older versions of macOS did not include as many notifications. Big Sur claims that:

Notification Center shows your alerts in the upper-right of your screen, without interrupting what you're doing. Show and hide Notification Center by click the clock in the menu bar.

And Notification Center, in theory, lets you disable notifications for a given program.

Problem is: there is visibly no way to disable notifications for ALL programs by default. So any time you launch a new program you still get notification spam like this:

Notification Center spam macOS Big Sur

It's distracting, breaks my focus, and makes the mac feels like a phone.

In addition: for a program whose notifications are disabled, whether the calendar style is set to "None" or "Banners" still seems to make an impact. If a program's notifications are disabled, I seem to still be getting a notification like the above the first time I launch it, except if I set its style to "None" beforehand.

That's a lot of time and attention wasted. Ergo:

How can I set notifications to disabled/"do not allow" and/or their alert style to "None", by default, for all programs?

Running Big Sur 11.5.1.


There are already related questions here and here, but I find them poorly phrased, with a focus on fixes that worked for older versions of macOS (Catalina) but no longer work.

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  • 3
    How about setting Do Not Disturb forever? Commented Aug 2, 2021 at 13:05
  • @ihf That's what I was thinking... But I still want to use the Calendar. Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 15:29
  • apple.stackexchange.com/q/408019/481575 (Big Sur) and apple.stackexchange.com/q/184633/481575 (Yosemite) are related to this question. Commented Jan 18, 2023 at 0:59
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    @josephdpurcell Not really, IMO. Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 3:48
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    Yeah my monitor is flipping on/off at all hours of the night even with Sleep/Focus/Do not Disturb. I had to go app by app and try and shut things off. Its disappointing this space has turned into a tangled mess of terms/feature creep. Commented Mar 30, 2023 at 16:31

1 Answer 1

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Go to settings>focus and create a new category with "add focus" (mine is called "work")

Add apps that you want to allow to show notifications (mine has only calendar, and a "pomodoro timer" app)

Macos settings, focus.

That's it.

If you need a variation of this, you can add a different category (ex: I have another one where I also allow incoming calls from some people/apps)

You can change the focus setting on the right side of your menu bar

focus, menu bar

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  • On earlier macOS (Mojave), when I didn't want to dismiss notifications one by one, I turned on the Do not Disturb switch at the top of Notification Center. All notifications that were visible disappeared immediately. When I use this method, enabling the Focus doesn't seem to hide already visible notifications, which has always been my indication that the filter is working. Will this still block subsequent notifications for these apps? Commented Feb 15 at 15:20

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