A two-minute triage routine

Most people either read every notification or none of them. A short routine, twice a day, beats both.

Selection mode

Select turns the list into something you can act on in bulk. It becomes Cancel while you are in it, and reveals Select All (n) and Unread (n) so you can grab everything or only the unread ones in one press. With a selection made you get Mark read and Delete.

The distinction is worth being deliberate about. Mark read keeps the card and takes it out of your queue; Delete removes it. Marking read is the safer default, since a notification you have read costs nothing to keep.

Each card also has its own Mark as read for the ones you want to handle individually.

The routine

Switch the read-state dropdown to Unread. Work down from Today, opening anything that needs an actual response and marking read anything that was purely informational. When you reach Earlier, stop reading and start selecting — the whole block can usually go.

Twice a day is plenty: once mid-morning, once before you finish. Checking constantly is how notifications turn into interruptions, which is the opposite of what a queue is for.

Starting again from scratch

If the backlog has become genuinely unmanageable, Mark All Read is the honest reset. It confirms first, asking Mark all notifications as read?, because it clears everything including things you have not seen.

Use it deliberately rather than as a reflex. If you find yourself marking everything read every few days, the queue is telling you something — usually that you are on tasks or threads you no longer need to follow, and the real fix is upstream of this page.

Do not read it as a record

Notifications are prompts, not storage. Anything that turned out to matter should end up as a task, a note or a reply, because the notification itself is designed to be cleared away.