Tame Your Slack Notifications

Slack is a handy way to connect with colleagues, friends, and people with similar interests. But in busy groups, message notifications can quickly get overwhelming. Here are five ways to tailor your Slack notifications to get more out of the app—and be more productive.

Working on something important? Temporarily mute all Slack notifications by clicking your profile icon (in the upper right corner) and choosing a time under Pause Notifications: For 30 minutes, For 1 hour, For 2 hours, Until tomorrow, or for a custom duration.

Stop Slack from bothering you during “get stuff done” hours by setting up a notification schedule (Preferences > Notifications > Notification schedule). You can choose to silence alerts during specific hours every day, only on weekends, or on a custom schedule you create.

Slack uses channels to group related conversations, and each channel you join will send you notifications of new messages. Although leaving a channel is one way to silence its alerts, a less drastic alternative is to use Slack’s channel-specific notification settings.

To customize a channel’s notifications, open the channel and click its title, then click the notification menu—the one that shows an alarm bell. In the menu that appears, choose either @Mentions (which notifies you only when someone uses @ to mention you or to post an announcement) or Off (to mute all notifications).

With either of these settings, the channel name will still be bolded whenever the channel contains new messages. If you find that distracting, choose the “Mute channel” option—the channel’s name will now be bolded only when you’re mentioned.

Pro tip: These options are also available for private group conversations.

For each channel, you can also choose to have different notification settings for your mobile devices—useful if you don’t mind notifications on your Mac but want to silence most or all of them on your iPhone.

To do so, open the channel’s notifications menu, click “More notification options,” and check “Use different settings for mobile devices.” Then choose the level of notifications you want when you’re on the go.

Cutting down on notifications doesn’t mean you have to miss the important ones. Slack keywords let you designate particular words, names, handles, and even emoji—in case your boss signals important documents with a siren emoji—to trigger special notifications.

Simply go to Preferences > Notifications; under “My keywords,” enter anything you want to be notified about, using a comma to separate items.

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