How to Keep Work Notifications From Taking Over Your Life

Thanks to world occasions which have affected nearly everybody on the planet, plenty of us are actually working from residence some—if not all—of the week. This has particular advantages, except you actually, actually get pleasure from your commute, however it additionally makes it tougher to keep boundaries between work and the whole lot else.

We’re speaking particularly about notifications outdoors of workplace hours, no matter these occur to be. Think emails from the boss or mentions within the firm Slack channel or incoming edits on recordsdata: If you retain alerts for some of these occasions on across the clock, you are by no means going to escape your job.

At greatest you are going to discover your leisure and rest time interrupted by distracting pings; at worst, they are going to pull you into finishing a process or following up on a job that may wait till tomorrow (or after the weekend.) If you are not getting notifications, you do not know what you are lacking—in the very best approach. Here’s how to set it up.

Settings Inside Your Apps

Before you even get into the settings which might be out there in your cellphone and laptop computer, take a look at the apps you utilize most frequently for work: It’s doubtless they’ve some configuration choices of their very own to guarantee they’re quiet at sure occasions of the day (or sure days within the week.) If you possibly can arrange a few of your key apps on this approach, you may not have to fear about every other settings.

Take Slack, for instance. Open up Slack on the net, click on your profile image within the high proper nook, then select Preferences. On the Notifications tab, together with disabling notifications utterly (which your superiors may not be too glad about,) you should utilize the Allow notifications settings underneath Notification schedule to solely allow alerts throughout sure hours within the day. You may even set particular occasions for various days.

Perhaps your workplace would possibly favor Microsoft Teams to Slack. You cannot set working hours in Teams, however you possibly can at the very least customise which channels you get notifications on and which gadgets notifications are despatched to—so you possibly can swap off alerts on your cellphone whereas conserving them in your laptop computer, for instance. To configure the entire out there choices, from the desktop interface go to Settings and extra, Settings, and Notifications.