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I am becoming increasingly frustrated by how often my work and thought process is derailed by having to wait several seconds for an unwanted Apple alert box to show itself (as a blocking window) and dismiss itself in the upper right corner area of my screen.

Although I have turned off all alerts that I know about having the ability to disable, the ones I can't seem to get rid of are the ones for incoming email messages and changes of tracks while playing from iTunes.

Does anyone know of a way to disable these or to at least speed up the alert so it doesn't get so much in the way of typing, work flow, thought processes, etc.?

Oh, it's funny how things change that don't get mentioned in Release Notes.

I just checked Notifications under System Preferences, and there is now an hour range for "Do Not Disturb", which I set from 12am to 12am to effectively shut it off altogether (I hope -- I may have to give it an hour of being turned off for it to not see that as ALWAYS being turned off).

That didn't seem to do the trick.

There is a separate list of apps (quite long) that have individual settings, with strange terms such as "badge" that aren't defined.

I guess I'll just have to experiment until the blasted things go away.

Apparently the ones I am annoyed by are referred to as "banners", with "alerts" being the other format.

I see a top-level icon for "None" though, so that may be the simplest thing to try vs. the lower-level configuration choices.

I could have sworn that I had thoroughly checked Alerts settings before my upgrade to El Capitan a few months back, and that nothing of this level of detail was available. Maybe I just looked in the wrong place before and caught a different set of alerts that aren't the ones I need to get rid of.

At least, as I am playing a Martha Argerich album while doing other tasks at the moment, I can see whether my changes affect iTunes alerts -- unless new settings don't kick in until a restart of iTunes or the computer itself.

Yes, clicking the "None" icon for most categories seems to do the trick.

I am allowing Banners on stuff like updates to Arturia solftware and for web browsers, but do not want permanently-blocking (until dismissed) Alerts on ANYTHING. Job done!

My apologies if this is stuff everyone else already knew. I do read Release Notes on most Apple updates, but I am so recently on El Capitan that I'm probably in the Dark Ages.

If it has been this way for years, then I am super-embarrassed.