While there are plenty of ways to limit notifications on our digital devices and avoid distraction overload, there’s nothing inherently wrong with these alerts. They just need to be well managed and kept in their place.
Keeping notifications useful and timely can help you get more done in the day, not less, and Windows 11 comes with built-in tools for setting up custom notifications that run on a schedule you specify.
You can use these scheduled notifications however you want. Maybe you need reminders to take breaks, or you want to make sure you devote specific blocks of time to certain projects, or you need alerts for when it’s time to go and pick the kids up.
However you want to use these custom notifications, here’s how to set them up—plus some extra apps that can help too.
Custom Notifications in Windows 11
Task Scheduler gives you a clean, simple way of creating alerts.Screenshot: David NieldIf you want to set up custom notifications in Windows 11 without turning to an app, the Task Scheduler is the utility you want. Type “task scheduler” into the search box on the taskbar or the Start menu, then select it when it appears.
Open the Action menu, choose Create Basic Task, and then give it a suitable name and description so you can identify it later. Click Next, and you can set the frequency of the notification: Your options are Daily, Weekly, Monthly, One time, When the computer starts, When I log on, and When a specific event is logged, so there’s a lot of flexibility.
Click Next again, and if you’ve chosen a recurring task then you can set exactly when it recurs—4 pm every afternoon, for example. Click Next, then choose Start a program, and select Next again. This opens up the dialog box screen for composing your notification.
In the Program/script field, you need to enter “msg,” and in the Add arguments (optional) field, you put your actual notification text: “Reminder: get up and do some stretching” or whatever it happens to be. With another click on Next you can review your notification, and then choose Finish to confirm.
Your notification is created, and will pop up at the specified time, whether or not Task Scheduler is open. If you ever need to edit or delete the task, you can head back to Task Scheduler to find it—it’ll be listed under the Task Scheduler Library heading, and you can right-click on the task to make changes.
Setting Notifications Through Apps
You're also able to set reminders through the built-in Clock app.Screenshot: David NieldThe appeal of the Task Scheduler is that it’s built right into the Windows operating system, so you don’t need any other apps running to get your notifications, but there are ways to do this with apps as well. The Microsoft Clock app comes preinstalled with Windows, for example, and lets you set custom alarms.
Once you’ve launched the app through the Start menu or taskbar search box, select Alarm to set one. Click on the + (plus) button in the lower right corner to create a new alarm, and you can give it a name—which is essentially the text you want for your notification. You can configure the time for the alarm, and when it should recur.
If that doesn’t do exactly what you want, another app that comes with Windows is Microsoft To Do—again, you can search for it from the taskbar or Start menu. As the name suggests, this is a fully fledged to-do app, but you can create custom notifications through it by attaching reminders to tasks.
Click Add a task to get started, and once you’ve given your new task a name, you can set the reminder details: What time and date you want the alert to appear, and whether or not you want the notification to repeat on a schedule. There's also the option to put your reminders into categories, if needed.
In terms of third-party apps, any clock, reminder, or to-do list app would do the job—something like TickTick, for instance—but these take you further away from the clean simplicity of just generating custom notifications and nothing else. Those apps will also come with extras you don’t necessarily need for this particular task.
