How to make work announcements not take over your life

Thank you global With events affecting everyone on the planet, so many of us are now working from home some — if not all — of the week. This has definite benefits, unless you really, really love your commute, but it also makes it harder to maintain boundaries between work and everything else.

We’re talking specifically about out-of-hours announcements, no matter what happens. Think emails from your boss or mentions in your company’s Slack channel or upcoming edits to a file: If you’re constantly alerted to these types of events, you’ll never be out of your business. me.

At best you will find your leisure and relaxation time interrupted by distracting pings; at worst, they’ll drag you to complete a task or track down a task that can wait until tomorrow (or after the weekend.) If you don’t get a notification, you don’t know what you’re missing -How best possible. Here’s how to set it up.

Install inside your app

Before you start the settings available on your phone and laptop, take a look at the apps you use most often for work: They probably have some configuration options of their own to make sure they quiet at certain times of day (or certain days of the week.) If you can set up some of your main apps this way, you probably don’t have to worry about any settings is different.

Take Slack for example. Open Slack on the web, click your profile picture in the top right corner, then select Interests. Above Notify , along with completely disabling notifications (which your superiors might not be happy about), you can use Allow notifications install below Notification calendar to only allow alerts at certain hours of the day. You can even set specific times for different dates.

Perhaps your workplace might prefer Microsoft Teams to Slack. You can’t set business hours in Teams, but you can at least customize which channels you get notifications from and to which devices they’re sent — for example, you can turn off alerts for your phone while still keep them on the laptop. To configure all available options, from the desktop interface, go to Settings and more, Setting, and Notify.