Like some of the folks above, I handle this with an admin account open in one browser and a regular (like TL1) user account in another.
There are a couple ways to handle a dual-account setup:
A.) Your primary personal account is an admin, and you hop to the TL1 account mostly for monitoring and testing purposes.
B.) Your primary personal account is a TL1 user, and you hop to the admin account for… admin stuff.
I use approach A – my identity is an admin. (And the TL1 account is a fairly obvious fictional character who occasionally does post publicly while testing.) I operate as admin partly for the reason you stated: access to notifications or flags. Also because it really doesn’t affect how I participate as a “user” at all.
You might use approach B, though to me it sounds more inconvenient. You could call your admin account SuperSteph, so when you do put on the admin hat it doesn’t look like you’re trying to be mysterious. (Or, just go ahead and be mysterious 
)