Turn Off Notification Center in OS X Mountain Lion Temporarily

Looking for some temporary peace and quiet from alerts and notifications but don’t want to completely disable Notification Center on your Mac? There are two quick ways to temporarily hush all notifications in OS X, both methods last until the next day before automatically resuming:

• Option+Click the Notification Center menu bar icon, it will turn grey when disabled

To re-enable Notifications, just option+click the menu bar icon again. It will turn black to signify that it’s active again.

If you’re less of a keyboard fan and more of a gestures person, you can also hush notifications directly from the panel itself:

• Swipe open Notification Center, swipe down, and flip “Show Alerts and Banners” to OFF

Flipping the switch back to ON, or option+clicking the icon works to re-enable alerts again. Here is a quick video showing both of these methods in use under OS X Mountain Lion:

If you want to continue to be alerted by are annoyed with the sounds, remember that you can mute notifications on a per-app basis too.

Thanks to everyone who sent in these tips.