Christmas is over. Hopefully everyone had a good time hanging out with friends and family, but it’s almost time to go back to work. It’s time to head back into the world of managing our time and working hard.
Is there anyone better to learn about time and project management than the person who has one of the hardest, and most dangerous jobs; even though he only does it one day a year. Yes, I’m talking about the icon of Christmas, one Mr. Santa Claus.
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I’m going to tell you a quick story, and it might just leave you feeling terrified. You’re getting ready to go out on a long run. You pair your Bluetooth headphones to your iPhone and start running. Five minutes in, your headphones die. You’re now stuck on a long run with no tunes.
This could happen because that icon at the top of the screen that shows battery percentages of connected Bluetooth devices is so tiny that it’s nearly useless. But there’s a better way! You can actually see these battery percentages in the Notification Center instead.
Open Notification Center and make sure you’re on the Today panel. Scroll to the bottom and click Edit. Scroll to the Batteries item on the list, and then click the + button to add it to your device.
Now, anytime you go to the Notification Center, you’ll see the battery percentage of any Bluetooth devices that are connected. It’s far more precise than the tiny one on the top of the screen, and now you’ll have a far more accurate idea of how much life your devices have left before you run out of the house.
Note: The Batteries item will only appear if a Bluetooth or other wireless device is connected!
Have you ever felt the terror of your Bluetooth device dying because you didn’t know its battery percentage? Share your horror stories in the comments!
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Customizing alerts for the Mail app on Windows 10 is straightforward. You can take care of it in just a couple of minutes.
Open up the app and click on the gear icon at the bottom right in the sidebar to open the fly-out Settings panel. Clicking on Options in this panel displays the settings for email accounts.
To customize alerts for an email account, select it from the dropdown at the top and scroll down to the Notifications section. There you’ll find the controls to turn notification banners, sounds, and Action Center updates for email on or off:
Want to tweak the default behavior for marking emails as read or to change how Mail looks? Go back to the Settings panel by clicking on the Back button next to Options. The Accounts, Personalization, and Reading sections there give you a few more useful controls.
Do you customize alerts for each email account? Or you do prefer to activate the quiet hours feature to silence notifications altogether?
Image Credit: illustration of a laptop by joingate via Shutterstock
Turning off notifications in Windows 10 is a great way to get some peace and quiet, and you can automate a schedule using the Quiet Hours feature.
Click on the notification icon in the system tray to open the integrated notifications panel. Look for Quiet Hours in the panel’s icon grid and click on it to toggle the feature on or off.
When Quiet Hours are active, the grid icon appears highlighted and your PC won’t bother you with notifications. But here’s the catch: on Windows 10, you don’t have control over the time window during which quiet hours function. The feature only works between midnight and 6 AM.
While the Quiet Hours feature comes in handy on any device, the Windows 10 version of it feels like a step in the wrong direction. Windows 8.1 handles this much better: you can configure Quiet Hours to your liking via Settings > Search and apps > Notifications.
Does the Quiet Hours feature sound useful to you? Or do you think the default setting makes it toothless on Windows 10? Tell us in the comments!
Image Credit: Quiet Hours Sign by Robert J. Beyers II via Shutterstock