Or you blind yourself to it and learn to just treat those tasks as one more excuse to not do the real stuff. I'm battling that at work: Many people see a flood of notifications etc. and disengage totally - if it's not causing a crisis, then clearly it does not need to be dealt with right away, and so it gets put aside if it's something boring.
I've forced myself to forgo almost all my mail filters and "consume" the raw stream of notification e-mails (thousands a day) and start each day with picking a few of the noisiest ones and addressing the root causes (and where possible doing so in a way that can be applied more broadly), but it's oh so tempting to just waste time on the superficial symptoms that are easy and quick to deal with individually, but will eat all my time if I let them.
I've forced myself to forgo almost all my mail filters and "consume" the raw stream of notification e-mails (thousands a day) and start each day with picking a few of the noisiest ones and addressing the root causes (and where possible doing so in a way that can be applied more broadly), but it's oh so tempting to just waste time on the superficial symptoms that are easy and quick to deal with individually, but will eat all my time if I let them.