Smart Notifications
Smart notifications are AI-filtered alerts that prioritize and batch notifications based on urgency, relevance, and your current context, replacing the constant stream of interruptions with timely, meaningful updates.
Understanding Smart Notifications
The average professional receives dozens of notifications per hour across email, Slack, project tools, and other apps. Most are low-priority, yet each one breaks focus and adds cognitive load. Smart notifications solve this by using AI to evaluate each alert against several factors: Is the sender important? Is the content urgent? Are you in a focus block? Can this wait until your next break? Instead of forwarding every alert, a smart notification system batches low-priority items, surfaces urgent ones immediately, and delivers the rest at optimal times. The result is fewer interruptions without missing anything critical.
How GAIA Uses Smart Notifications
GAIA acts as an intelligent filter between your tools and your attention. Instead of letting every Slack message, email, and GitHub notification interrupt you, GAIA evaluates each one and decides how to handle it. Urgent messages from key contacts are surfaced immediately. Routine updates are batched into a digest delivered at times you choose. During focus blocks, GAIA holds non-critical notifications and presents them when your deep work session ends. You stay informed without being constantly interrupted.
Related Concepts
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort required to process information, make decisions, and manage tasks at any given time.
Deep Work
Deep work is a state of focused, uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding tasks that produces high-quality results, as defined by computer science professor Cal Newport.
Proactive AI
Proactive AI is an artificial intelligence system that anticipates user needs, monitors for relevant events, and takes autonomous action before being explicitly asked.
Context Awareness
Context awareness in AI is the ability to understand the full situation surrounding a task or interaction, including who is involved, what has happened before, related projects, deadlines, and the user's preferences and patterns.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does GAIA decide which notifications are important?
GAIA evaluates notifications based on sender importance, content urgency, your current calendar status, and historical patterns. A message from your manager about a deadline gets through immediately. A newsletter or low-priority update gets batched for later.
Can I customize how GAIA handles my notifications?
Yes. You can configure priority rules for specific contacts, channels, and tools. You can set focus hours when only critical notifications come through, and choose how often you receive batched digests for non-urgent items.
