Tame your Slack notifications

Slack seamlessly connects colleagues, friends and fans of just about any subject through an online community. Here are five ways to tailor its settings to manage your notifications and get the most out of the app.

Slack groups usually have multiple channels for different conversations. You could simply leave a channel to avoid alerts from it, but there are less drastic things to try.

Open the channel (or group message) in Slack and click on its title, then Channel Settings (the icon looks like a gear). Choose Notification Preferences from the dropdown menu and from there you can select to “Mute entire channel”, ignore certain kinds of @channel pings or turn off notifications specifically on desktop or mobile.

Spending the day working on something important? Mute Slack notifications for a channel by clicking the bell icon by your workspace name in the upper left corner of the app. Under the Snooze Notifications options, you can quiet Slack for as briefly as 20 minutes or up to 24 hours.

You can also halt Slack from messaging you at the same time each day. Click the bell icon in the upper left corner and select Do Not Disturb Schedule from the dropdown. You can then set a specific time every day to silence Slack.

In Slack’s notification preferences, you can limit both how and where you’re notified.

For example, you can choose to get alerts on your Mac and iPhone simultaneously or only after your desktop has been idle. This is a great way to eliminate duplicate alerts.

Keyword notifications can be set for any word (in case your boss tags important documents with it) or even an emoji.

Click the bell icon in the upper left corner and select Your Notification Preferences from the dropdown. Toward the middle of the page, click into the My Keywords text box and enter all the keywords or emoji you always want notifications for when someone uses them.

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