Why so many notifications, Google?

2026-01-08

Occasionally I have to collaborate with myself via Google. Either I create the document on the wrong account or I share it with another account for easy access. Whatever the case, Google sends an absurd number of notifications when you share something with someone. I created and shared a test document to count.

Two for my email (one for computer, one for phone, which is alright if it was the only thing)...

one through Google Chat...

and one through Google Drive.

Why on earth do I need to know in so many ways about this one event? Particularly, why am I by default recieving communications on Google Chat, which I do not use? I can luckily uninstall the Google Chat plugin to get rid of one of the notifications. Google Drive and Gmail however I do not want to turn off notifications for. The former has too few to bother, the latter contains important information most of the time.

I've noticed this is characteristic of many software suites. Lots of notifications about the same event, through several different channels. This is an especially insidious problem when connecting two software suites (Todoist and Google Calendar, Outlook and Webex). It's not usually either platform's fault but a user configuration error.

I wonder if there's a better way to unify notifications for a single piece of information...