

I highly recommend going through its notification preferences and tuning the various sounds and other distractions to your liking. Consider blocking off time for deep work and making it a regular part of your schedule, preventing Slack from becoming a sort of always-on electronic meeting that takes over your entire workday.Įven when you’re active, Slack can be pretty noisy by default. You can put up a status message telling your co-workers you’re working on something important, too. To focus without distractions, turn on Do Not Disturb mode for a while. If a message isn’t urgent, it probably shouldn’t interrupt your deep work. Slack can easily turn productive work hours into - well - slacking. Stop Slack from turning deep work into slacking You can join the conversation on your own schedule. This helps lessen the temptation of #random and other channels that aren’t critical. Slack recommends leaving channels you don’t care about, but muting is a good compromise for channels you kind of care about - or if you just don’t want your co-workers to see a message saying you’ve left the channel. To mute a channel, click the gear icon in a channel and select the “Mute” option. It won’t turn bold and encourage you to click it when a new message arrives. When you mute a channel, it turns gray in the sidebar. Mute channels you don’t need notifications from. That’s fine, but do you really need Slack notifying you about all those conversations? Every Slack starts with a #random channel for off-topic chatter, and people tend to create more off-topic channels from there. Tell Slack which channels matter (and which don’t) No one has to worry about time zones before sending a message. I manage a team of employees and freelancers all over the world, and Do Not Disturb is critical. Or, use the “Custom” option to tell the app exactly how long you’ll be away from work. If you work Monday to Friday and have the weekends off, you can tell Slack to pause notifications “Until Next Week” when the workday is done on Friday. Slack is working on an automatic weekend Do Not Disturb feature, but that’s not available yet.

Now you’ll get notifications only during working hours. Do you work from 9 to 5? Tell Slack to automatically disable notifications from 5 p.m. Click the bell and select “Do Not Disturb schedule” to automatically enable Do Not Disturb mode at designated times.
