Notifications on your smartphone are useful — one might even say essential to the experience. It was Android's early lead in notification management that helped it gain traction against Apple. Notification overload is a thing these days, with dozens of apps and services screaming for your attention, but Google is rolling out a new feature that will help cut down on the noise in one very specific instance. When you're using Gmail on your computer, you can pause the Gmail notifications on your phone. There's clearly still some work to be done, though.

This feature first appeared in a limited fashion back in February, according to 9to5Google, but the rollout appears to have accelerated today. We have heard from several readers (thanks, Nick) who saw the notification pause dialog in Gmail, and I saw it myself just a little bit ago.

If you take Google up on its offer, you'll have to allow Gmail to monitor your device usage (see below). As of this writing, I have not seen any settings in Gmail to enable or disable this feature, but you can control the device access permission under settings > Security and Privacy > Site Settings > Additional Permissions.

With the notification pause enabled, new emails will only alert on your desktop. Of course, you still get those emails on your phone, but they don't make a peep or appear on your screen. Step away from the computer, and notifications should start coming through on the phone again.

Since there aren't any settings in Gmail, it does not appear you can turn this feature on manually—you simply have to wait for Google to offer. It does appear to be offering this on a lot of accounts today, though. Presumably, this feature will be made official at some point, hopefully with usable settings. In the meantime, keep an eye out for the above popup.