Slack: How To Configure a Notification Schedule

Notifications are a great tool that can help to keep you up to date with events and let you know when messages are sent to you. Unfortunately, you don’t always want to be bothered by notifications. If you’re busy and trying to focus, then notifications can be distracting. Additionally, if you’re trying to keep a strict work/life balance, then you probably don’t want to receive notifications from work once you’ve left for the day.

To allow you to manage when you can receive notifications, Slack offers a “Do not Disturb” mode. “Do not Disturb” can be activated for a specific timeframe or can be configured to automatically activate to mute notifications for a period of the day. To be able to configure a notification schedule that enables “Do not Disturb” for a period of the day, you need to go into your preferences. To do so, click on your profile picture in the top-right corner, then click on “Preferences”.

Once in your preferences, scroll down to the “Notification schedule” section of the default “Notifications” tab. Here you can configure a schedule for the period of the day throughout which you want to receive notifications. First, you need to choose between the setting applying to every day, only weekdays, or if you want to manually specify times for each day. Next, configure a start and end time for when you want to receive notifications. Once, you’re happy with your configuration, simply close the preferences popup, as it will automatically save.

Note: The schedule defaults to sending you notifications between 8 am and 10 pm every day. Ideally, you should configure this period to be slightly wider than your working hours.

If you’re busy and just want to temporarily disable notifications as a one-off, click on your profile picture in the top-right corner, then move your mouse over “Pause notifications” to open the second layer of the menu. In the second layer of the menu, select one of the default options for how long you want to enable “Do not Disturb”, or select “Custom” and enter the date and time you want “Do not Disturb” to end.

Tip: If someone really needs to urgently contact you and you have “Do not Disturb” enabled, it is possible for each person to override your “Do not Disturb” setting and notify you about one private message a day. This means you don’t need to worry about missing a critically time-sensitive message.

I hope this guide has helped you configure a notification schedule in Slack. Feel free to leave a comment below.