I've silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it's been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.

I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.

I've been doing the same thing for a few months now. At first I had it set up to shut up after 6 pm, but these days it's just completely silent. I check it every so often, on my own terms, because there are some things that I do want to engage with—a call or a text message, for example.

Still, I've had to push back against the expectation of being available 24/7 and responding immediately to everything. A text that goes unanswered for a few minutes becomes a phone call or three, to ask why I'm not responding. It's bloody exhausting sometimes.

As for me, people have learnt that they can't reach me most of the time instantly. You don't have to answer the phone calls either. You can say later that you didn't see it and your phone was muted (which is true). People get used to it pretty quickly. I guess, for most people it's just a few family members or other very close relations anyway. Romantic partners are the worst, of course, in this regard. One has to be smart to set the expectations at the very beginning. (I guess it can be done later too, though.)

I have had my smartphone on vibrate-only since pretty much the beginning of having a smartphone, as I find it much less distracting than audio notifications, and much easier to ignore. I have almost all notifications turned off, except for calls and texts, and notifications from my security system. It's that last thing that prevents me from being able to leave my phone out of sight all the time.

I leave mine on silent, however, my 2FA app is on the phone. Getting up to retrieve from another room at each auth request would be tiresome. Maybe time to get a Yubikey like device instead???

I’d advice setting up a password store[0] which does allow to get OTP codes right on the same device, but of course, it kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA but I still use it for not so important stuff.

[0] https://passwordstore.org

imo, as long as you combine "something you know" and "something you have," the effect is the same. So if you store your 2fa encrypted with a on your computer with a key only you know, it accomplishes the same thing.

Anyone who’s used Apple 2FA on a Mac would be familiar with this - you can take the code from the same computer you’re using to log on to the Apple service.

KeePassXC can handle TOTP on a computer. You can use KeePassDX on Android as well and keep them synced with Syncthing.

Bitwarden let's you use 2fa from your password vault if you pay $10/yr.

i have coworkers who get an old phone with nothing in it for the 2fa needs

There are desktop apps for 2FA