Do you know what gets in the way of you having the most productive day possible?
Distractions!
And do you know what's really distracting?
Little red badges on your iOS device.
These are intended to be helpful, to tell you something that is within the app by just glancing at your home screen.
But more often than not, they just pull your focus away from more important things and they tempt you to click on the app more than you actually need to.
Here you see my mail app.
It has a little red 3 telling me that I have 3 unread emails.
Here I have my Sunrise calendar app telling me I have 21 events scheduled for today.
That's a lot.
I think that's actually the combination of all of my shared calendars than just the events for today, 21.
Well, both of these numbers I feel are useless.
They're not helping me in any way.
They're only tempting me to go click on them more than I need to when I should be doing something more productive.
When I should be doing something more important.
So to turn these badges off, you select Settings and you're going to select Notifications.
Under Notifications you're going to find a full list of all of your apps that allow some type of notification.
I'm going to find my mail app and there is the badge app icon.
And I just toggle it, turn it off.
Let's go back and find my calendar app.
Badge app icon, I want to turn that off.
And when I return to my home screen.
Viola!
It's nice and clean, nice and crisp.
I don't have any stupid red badges trying to distract me, trying to tempt me to open up that app.
Now, you may have an app where those red badges are helpful.
A text app or some type of messaging app.
It may actually be helpful if you've missed something and you want to be notified of that just by glancing at your screen.
But I find in most cases, in the majority of cases, they are actually just pulling you away, they are more of a distraction than actually being helpful.
So go into Settings, turn off the badge app icon and get rid of those red circles.
It's very simple.
