What requires your attention?
I remember reading some blog posts maybe 20 years ago that were discussing "interrupt-driven" vs "polling" work styles. When I was younger my memory was worse and I would frequently run unix commands like:
./doit.sh ; echo "done" | mail page-gno@yahoo-inc.com
And at work there is always "someone showing up at your desk". But back then, computers didn't really have notification systems at least by my memory. I "looked it up", and the notification center didn't show up until 2012, at least according to some AI crap that Google spewed at me. But that's good enough for my purposes which suggest that notifications first came on the scene as a part of smart phones, and from there they moved onto desktop UI, at least as a first-class concept (for a long time there have been "alert dialogs" but those are different because they are direct feedback from the application you are interacting with).
So anyway, as usual, I am a "middle path" kind of a a guy. There are some situations that interrupts are useful, and others where polling is better (I guess Linux agrees with me these days because their network subsystem uses a hybrid interrupt/polling model.
I had a manager at Facebook who noticed that "apps" would invariably abuse notifications. I think one way this happens is that they review metrics and they notice "oh there are 10% of users who have our app installed but haven't opened it in 6 months". They figure: send them a notification. What's the worst that happens? They uninstall the app. What's the best? They become an active user again. So they send some notification
Hey did you miss us?
This whole discussion got me to turn off all the notifications on everything, except for 3: I get notifications for phone calls, sms, and signal. That's it.
The rest of it can wait until I get to it.