Fix Slack Noise: Notifications, Sidebar, and Etiquette (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I got a hot take. Slack isn't noisy, but your workspace is. Let's fix it. Hello, and welcome back to Slack School. My name is Mike Reynolds. I'm your host, and I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce, and it's time we talked about noise. Specifically, the noise your company creates in Slack. First, let's be clear about what noise is. Noise is the constant barrage of notifications and messages that make some folks feel like they can't separate the stuff that does matter from the stuff that doesn't. It's understandable that noise happens. Just think about what Slack is doing for us. Slack centralizes all these different tools, apps, and agents that we use all day and puts them into the same UI. This is why we call Slack an agentic operating system. So the noise that we're getting from several different places is being concentrated into Slack. If you've done nothing to manage that, Slack would seem pretty noisy. So let's look at the problem of noise in, let's look at the problem of noise in three ways. First, we'll deal with the notifications themselves. Then we'll clean up some visual noise by dealing with our sidebar. And last, we'll go over some etiquette, and that's gonna help you and everyone around you. Let's dive in. Slack notifications can be set in a few places, but we wanna start with the defaults. So we get to those defaults by clicking on the name of our workspace. Here, I'm in the Slack community, where you should be, and we should go to preferences. Now it's gonna open up to the notifications section, which is perfect, and this is where we're gonna set our defaults. First, you've got a global setting to turn off all desktop or mobile notifications. I want these to be on, so I've got them on. The next thing we have is what to notify you about. We've got two options here. We can be notified about literally everything, or a subset of that. The subset is gonna work for the overwhelming majority of people. This is gonna be when someone sends you a direct message or specifically mentions you in a channel. We definitely want those notifications. The next thing is to notify you about other types of options. Now, thread replies, I tend to leave this on. If I've been responding in a thread, I usually want to know that somebody responded, but if the nature of your work is that there's tons and tons of threads, and you don't wanna unfollow those specific threads, then this is a good thing to turn off here. There's also this option here, messages from VIPs, even if notifications are paused. This is essentially an override for when you turn off your notifications that allows VIPs to get through anyway. In the Slack community workspace, I have this turned off. At work, I have it turned on, but I also only have one VIP because that person never sends me a message that isn't important. You can also choose to set up mobile overrides. When we click this, I've got an option here for everything or mentions in direct messages. You can also do channel keywords. I wanna be notified about every time somebody in a public channel says Slack School. So that's what this does for me. I also have a notification schedule. This is really great, and you've absolutely gotta set up a notification schedule. What this does is it says, these are the hours when I want notifications to actually happen. If somebody sends me a message, maybe I've got a coworker who works in Japan, my coworker in Japan can send me a message at two in the morning, I am not gonna receive that notification. It'll happen once my notification schedule window begins. You can do everyday, weekdays, or custom. If you go custom, we've got a lot of flexibility here. You can adjust it to your heart's content. This is probably the most important setting for your notifications in general. This is the window when you're working. If you're not working and you're not interested in being notified, let Slack know and we will stop those notifications. I'm gonna leave mine at everyday the same because this works for this workspace for me. We also have a default time for the reminder of notifications. This is when you start to say, remind me about this tomorrow. When I want to be reminded the next day, I want that reminder to be at nine o'clock, not at eight o'clock when I typically start my day. The beginning of my day is kind of hectic. There's always a lot to catch up to. I don't need another thing happening at that time. You could pick the end of your day or noon or really any time that works for you. Another setting that I really like is being able to control when I get notifications on my mobile device. We don't need notifications in more than one location. If I get notified on desktop, I don't want to be notified on my mobile. This thing is only good for me if I'm not using this thing, right? So since I'm using my computer, I can throw this away. Another really important option is your email notifications. Now, I don't need email notifications for the most part. So I actually have my email notifications set up to never, right? I don't need email, that's unnecessary. If we keep going down, we've also got a bunch of things around the sound and appearance of notifications. My favorite that I want to call out here is this included preview of the message in each notification. When you get that notification on your desktop or on your mobile device that has content in it, it says, hey, so-and-so started to send you this message and it gives you the beginning of that message. Maybe you don't want to see that because for privacy reasons, you would rather not. This is the box that controls that. We've also got specific sounds for different events. Set those up the way you want. Knock brush is the best sound though. Just saying. And for huddles, it's boot plus. There's no debate about this. It is boot plus. This is the ring sound. I'm not saying huddle music. That's a whole different thing. Showing a badge on Slack's icon to indicate new activity. This is going to be the literal badge on your app icon. And that's how you control that. We've got a couple other settings that we can take a look at. We can have VIPs in Slack. So I could say that this person is a VIP. Every time they send a message, I want to have a specific set of rules for them. And you can see what those settings are here. And then there's one other place and preferences that we want to take a look at, which is the mark as read. This is really important, specifically when you think about channels and how you want channels to operate. I'm a big fan of this start where I left off and then mark the channel as read. That behavior works well for me, but you can set it if you'd like. And then it reminds you of these shortcuts. Now that we're done with preferences, let's think about channel specific things. In our left sidebar, we really want to make sure that these channels are organized or set up in a way that makes sense to you. This is personal, it's for you. Set it up the way that works for you. For me, it's pretty simple. In this workspace, all I really need is start where I've got two channels that I actually care about. And then I have a larger bucket for Slack. And then essentially just a big bucket for channels. You can also have a general bucket of channels that you don't really care about. And then I just hide that. If I need to go into those channels, I certainly can, but I don't see everything that's coming. Now, something that you can do when you've got a channel that is really important to you or you have any new channels, you want to make sure not only that they're organized into buckets, but that the specific notifications for that channel have been set up the way that you want. So let's take a look at that. If I click on the name of the channel, up here at the top, I can see how I'm going to be notified. And here I have just at mentions. I don't get notifications for every single post. I don't need that. But if somebody wants to at mention me, I'd like to see that. I can also mute and hide the channel. Muting and hiding is pretty straightforward. You won't get any notifications from the channel. You still have it still in your sidebar, but you actually don't see updates that are happening. If you click on the channel, you can see everything, but we're not going to tell you that there's stuff happening in that channel because you've muted it. We also have advanced options. Advanced options let you control with a bit more granularity. This is something that I wouldn't do on every channel, but when you need it, it's great to have. I do like pointing out to people, if you find that a channel is particularly noisy because of people who are using at here or at channel, you can go ahead and say, I don't care about that. You're allowed. Give yourself permission. It's okay. When we think about things like at here or at channel, there's something that we want to be very careful about is overusing those or using them incorrectly. So what's the difference? At here, we'll send a notification to all of the members of the channel who are here. They're at their computer. They're active in Slack right now, in the moment. They're here. If you use at here, we will send a notification to all of those people. If you say at channel, you're saying every member of the channel, whether they're active or not. Generally speaking, you don't need to use these. We need to use them sparingly. Think about the story about the boy who cried wolf. If you want to say something to a large group of people, use those tools. When we think about etiquette, there's a couple other things that we can do. Let's say I type a message. It's a really important message. I could send this right now, but now's probably not a good time for Jacob. So I can choose to schedule this message for later. Instead of just hitting send, I can click this little down arrow and it'll prompt me specific times. Do I want to send it tomorrow at 9 a.m.? Do I want to send it Monday at nine? Or I can choose my date and time. I want to send this tomorrow at 9 a.m. because it's very important to Jacob know I wanted to say hi to him tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Don't just send messages. Think about when that person's working and be a good citizen. Well, there you have it. Managing your notifications in Slack is easier than you'd think. Be sure to let me know how it went for you in the comments or jump into the Slack community workspace and tell me in the Slack School channel. I'll get the notification. See you next time. Don't forget to like and subscribe. You did a good job today. So since I'm using my computer, I can throw this away. The screen was already broken, I think.