Yes email. At least at work, I don't have any notifications on my desktop. I check email a few times a day and otherwise work on what I have planned for that day.

The people at work who have chat and email notifications turned on just spend their days reacting to whatever comes in.

I find that if something is urgent enough, somebody will call me or come to my office to get my attention.

I operate several workstations and some have notifications while some don't. For various sites and email addresses. Some notifications are sparse and important, some are frequent and unimportant. There's no reason not to let the sparse and important ones come through. It's efficient.

privacy badger is a better drop-in replacement for ghostery anyway

I find Ghostery (in combination with uBO and uM) useful for identifying the purpose of many of the things blocked so I can selectively unblock where appropriate.

You missed the part where Ghostery is anti-user. They even went open source last March in an attempt to turn around the growing bad faith but the motives were very transparent.