"Cortana, next time I'm at Kroger, remind me to get trash bags" is something I use all the time still. It really is the best approach, and something I don't think Cortana gets enough credit for, as one of the key "personal assistant" workflows that they made sure they got right.
Notification spam on my phone makes that unusable. In between google asking my review of a gas station and some mobile phone game bugging me for not playing enough and a notification about an email that I handled on a desktop six hours ago and a missed call from a suspected spam number there might or might not be an important shopping list notification but I'll never see it buried in the reflexive clearing of spam notifications. And I have it relatively easy...
One of the first things to do is to switch off and actively refuse all notifications unless you find one that is really very, very useful to you. It makes no sense to leave the defaults.
There are entire apps that I've found alternatives for simply because I didn't like their notifications. I'm also very quick to deprioritize and/or block notifications for apps that don't need notifications. Notification management is a real concern.
I still think that the Windows Live Tile approach to notifications that don't need immediate attention is still one of the best, and wish Android and iOS would both offer something much more similar to that as a good option to help clean up the notification world.
