I turned off badges for seven days. Not as a productivity stunt — as a test of whether the work I claimed to care about actually needed a ping.
The first two days were noisy in the opposite way: I kept opening apps to check that nothing was on fire. By day four the checking faded. What remained were two calendars and a single inbox pass in the afternoon.
The useful part was not the silence. It was seeing which messages were actually tasks, and which were just other people’s urgency wearing a red dot.