Configure Notifications

Slack has a fine array of options to notify you about things that happen in channels and conversations. It also supports the notion of presence, a term for how your availability appears to other people on your team. Slack adjusts how it notifies you depending on your presence, and people in your team can view your status to determine whether you’re likely to see a new message in Slack or be notified of one. The presence-related features in Slack are not as rich as in some other messaging systems, but presence is a key part of Slack interaction, so it’s worth mastering the nuances.

I’ll begin by explaining how your presence is determined, and then help you Control Slack Notifications so that you receive precisely the kind of visual indicators and notifications that match your needs, team by team and channel by channel. The chapter ends with directions for overriding Slack’s notifications at the operating system level, in Control Slack Notifications Locally.

Make Your Presence Known

Presence is a techie term that combines both “where you’re at” and “what you’re doing.” It’s used by systems to make a determination about when to avoid bothering you, as well as by people who want to know what’s up with you.

If you have more than one device signed in to the same Google account, or have multiple iOS and OS X devices that share the same Apple ID for iMessage and iCloud services, you probably know what I’m talking about. When you receive a message, all your devices and computers may alert you all at once—terrible! But if everything is configured and the system obeys your settings, only the hardware you’re actively using pings you. The other devices remain silent or display a quiet notification.

In Slack, your presence can let teammates know whether you’re available, though Slack doesn’t offer enough gradations to be as useful as most other messaging systems. The three presence modes are: away, inactive, and snoozing. (Snoozing is sometimes called Do Not Disturb.) In some cases, Slack will automatically switch you into a different mode, while in other cases, your actions set your mode.

Check Your Presence

In the desktop and Web apps, you can check your Slack presence–specific to each team that you’ve joined–by looking at the icon to the left of your name near the top of the main sidebar (Figure 112).

**Figure 112:** At the top of the main sidebar, your presence appears as a small icon to the left of your account name.
Figure 112: At the top of the main sidebar, your presence appears as a small icon to the left of your account name.

If you are active, the icon is filled , as in the figure. If you are away, the icon is hollow and your name appears in italics, and if you are snoozing, the hollow icon is snoring with a z . The icon’s color depends on Slack’s color scheme, but otherwise doesn’t mean anything.

Slack doesn’t allow admins to monitor what users are up to: they can’t see what channel or conversation you currently have your focus on in any app, they can’t tell how much time you’re spending in any channel or conversation, and they can’t determine whether you’re actually in front of your computer or using your smartphone.

This puts a lot of “pressure” on presence to tell a story in organizations that care about your productivity and time. Presence statuses might imply some of the following:

Set Your Presence

To determine your presence, Slack combines your explicit choices, where you can force a status, and your implicit ones, where it watches your behavior to divine what you’re up to (and on which devices).

Generally, here’s how Slack infers your presence:

Slack automatically sets your presence, but you can override Slack’s automatic presence change in all but the Android app:

**Figure 113:** You can override Slack and set yourself to “away.”
Figure 113: You can override Slack and set yourself to “away.”

If you’ve marked yourself away, Slack will respect your status until either you manually set yourself as active or one of two events happens:

At that point, Slack asks if you want to go back to Active (Figure 114).

**Figure 114:** Slack honors your away time.
Figure 114: Slack honors your away time.

Of course, if you’re logged in to multiple Slack apps at once, you’ll be shown as Active whenever you move around among apps. I tend to quit Slack on the desktop (and close browser tabs) when I won’t use it for a while, as that makes Slack more reliable about notifying me about things that happen while I’m inactive.

View a Teammate’s Presence

You can learn the presence of a teammate by examining the icon that appears next to their name in many locations, including the Team Directory, the profile panel that appears if you click their name or avatar in a message, or—for one-on-one conversations—in the main sidebar adjacent that conversation. As with your icon, filled means active, hollow means away, and hollow with a z means snoozing.

Multi-party conversations show the number of participants in the main sidebar (with a small numeric badge at the left), and you can check the presence of participants in various ways:

Control Slack Notifications

Holy cow, but Slack has a lot of ways to keep you informed of what’s going on! You will certainly find yourself tweaking the notification settings over time to find the right fit for you. The defaults can be overwhelming, a fact that Slack notes in a warning on the Notifications tab in your Account page (Figure 115).

**Figure 115:** It is pleasant to see Slack’s consideration in recommending settings that will demand less attention.
Figure 115: It is pleasant to see Slack’s consideration in recommending settings that will demand less attention.

Let’s start with what Slack monitors for, and then how to manage how it relays that to you.

What Slack Tracks

Slack’s notifications revolve around letting you know that something happened while you weren’t looking. Notifications appear only for channels or conversations to which you belong, and only when one of the following events happens:

Many of these events translate into visual indicators, while some can also trigger notifications (such as alert sounds, sliding banners, or modal alerts), depending on your settings.

Visual Indicators

As noted in earlier chapters, an unread message turns the name of its channel or conversation in the main sidebar bold, while conversations also display the number of unread messages in the sidebar. In the mobile apps, a heading appears in the main sidebar labeled Unread or Unreads, grouping channels and conversations with unread messages.

In addition to those sidebar clues, you can see event information on your Slack app icon in the form of a badge:

Set Notification Preferences

Although each Slack app has some notification controls specific to its platform, the most comprehensive place to manage the truly vast number of options is the Web app, so that’s where I’ll focus. Make sure you are signed in to the team for which you want to set notifications, open the Account page (see Finding the Account Page), and select the Notifications tab (Figure 117). (If your tab looks rather different, click the “customize your notification settings” link.)

**Figure 117:** The two pop-up menus at the top of the Notifications tab in the Web app let you set notifications for the desktop (plus Web on any platform) and mobile apps.
Figure 117: The two pop-up menus at the top of the Notifications tab in the Web app let you set notifications for the desktop (plus Web on any platform) and mobile apps.

I’ll walk through the controls on this tab just ahead, but as you decide on your settings, keep in mind that you can temper or override them in two ways:

Desktop and Mobile Notifications

At the top of the Notifications tab, the Desktop Notifications pop-up menus control behavior for both any Slack desktop app and Slack running in any Web browser, even on a mobile device. The Mobile Push Notifications preference covers only the Slack iOS and Android apps. With these menus, you can control how Slack notifies you about specific occurrences:

Mobile Push Timing

The Mobile Push Timing preference controls the relationship between Slack on the desktop and Slack’s mobile apps. Because you may have an active session on the desktop that you’ve stepped away from briefly, the system lets you set a variable delay—from 1 minute to 30 minutes—before inactivity on the desktop causes notifications to shift to your mobile devices.

Channel Specific Settings

This area lists channels and conversations that you’ve selected by clicking “Add a custom setting for a channel” (Figure 118).

**Figure 118:** Each channel can override global preferences.
Figure 118: Each channel can override global preferences.

Each channel or conversation has its own overrides in three categories for both Desktop and Mobile: Everything, Mentions, and Nothing. Everything is just like the global Activity of Any Kind, while Mentions sends a notification only when someone uses your handle.

The Nothing label has to be discussed in the context of channel muting, also available here as a checkbox labeled “Mute this channel,” as they comprise a kind of constellation of silence:

To summarize: Nothing suppresses all notifications related to you, while mute changes the way in which the channel or conversation shows unread @mentions, highlights, and messages, as the case may be.

There’s one more setting you can change for a channel, below the “Mute” options for each channel: you can suppress channel-wide “howdys” via the special @channel handle (or @everyone in #general), which reduces general chatter.

Why would you want to suppress alerts and visual indicators? You may want to be in a channel without following it frequently. You might want to drop in occasionally, or have its messages appear in search results, or be alerted of any highlight words that occur. You can’t take yourself out of a multi-party conversation, but you can dim down its notifications similarly to how you would for a channel.

Additional Settings

Two of these options relate to notifications. They provide valuable ways to refine the settings higher up on this tab:

**Figure 119:** Highlight words can let you know when people are talking about things you want to know have been mentioned.
Figure 119: Highlight words can let you know when people are talking about things you want to know have been mentioned.

Control Slack Notifications Locally

Whatever your notification settings in Slack, Slack will send those notifications to your operating system or Web browser; however, you can use your operating system or browser to temper or override Slack’s pings. For example, on your Mac, you might want just a banner to slide by, but on your Android smartphone you might want an alert sound.

Here’s a quick look at where to specify these options:

With desktop browsers (minimum version tested listed below), once you’ve approved the receipt of Slack notifications in the browser, the entries for notifications are shown for each Slack subdomain, in the form team-name.slack.com: