<aside> 👇 Navigate to other sections of our Slack guide:

Slack Channel guidelines Rules and conventions

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📣  Introduction

In large Slack organizations, it is not uncommon for users to experience an overwhelming amount of “noise” caused by notifications, messages, mentions and a constant flow of information, rapidly being shared across various channels.

Slack acts as a public forum for everyone at Oyster, and with our distributed nature comes the fact that our Slack space is always brimming with activity. This fact makes controlling the flow of Slack messages that much more challenging - but not impossible. What we have to remember is a simple fact:

Remember..

You control Slack, it doesn’t control you!

<aside> 💡 With a bit of focus, discipline, and with the support of the best practices we’ve laid out below, you can take control of the noise in Slack and customize it so it fits your needs!

</aside>

🎛️  Control your notifications

Customizing your notifications is the first step in controlling the noise in Slack. You can access these settings in your Slack preferences.

<aside> 👀 To make this easier, we included a quick tour of Slack preferences in the video here. 👉

</aside>

There are a few options we recommend, but feel free to customize this towards your needs:

Notification preferences in Slack walkthrough

Notification preferences in Slack walkthrough

1. Notify me about:

• set to “Direct messages, mentions & keywords”
• toggle on **Notify me when a huddle starts in one of my channels / Notify me about replies to threads I'm following **(these are useful to have by default, you can turn notifications on threads by unfollowing them if they are not relevant)

1. My Keywords: we recommend against adding keywords here if your goal is to reduce noise. However, if you have specific keywords that you need to be informed about when used - feel free to add them.

2. Notification schedule: set it to match the hours when you are working and wish to receive notifications. This will ensure that you do not receive notifications when you are not working or during focus time.

3. Sound & appearance:

• Toggle off Mute all sounds from Slack.
• Toggle off Show a badge on Slack's icon to indicate new activity (this will effectively remove the 🔴 on your Slack application icon, but you will still be able to see new messages in the application itself).

1. When I'm not active on desktop: Make sure that Send me email notifications for mentions and direct messages is toggled off.

You can also choose to mute notifications

⏸️ Pause notifications with DND