Slack Wants Users To Avoid Getting Distracted From Pings or Mentions While ‘Status’ Is Live

A great benefit of ‘Setting a Status’ on Slack is that it keeps your colleagues in the loop if they can’t speak to you directly or see you in the office. 

It is a great way to notify people when it is a good time to send you a message, and when it isn’t; whether you are busy with a client or you just stepped out of the office. 

And so instead of having to apologise to them several times for replying late, you might benefit from knowing how to set a status in Slack, and creating a way to manage your coworkers’ expectations. 

Also, in trying to fulfill its mission to create a work-life that’s simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, Slack wants its twelve million plus daily active users to remember to pause notifications before calls. 

The Team Collaboration Hub recently added a small but needed new feature to help its users concentrate during working hours, and even set a notification schedule for routine times they’d prefer not to be notified. 

Pause your notifications in Slack works when you’re on Do Not Disturb (DND) mode. When you activate DND, all notifications and @mentions will be paused. Once you resume notifications, you can review the messages you received while in DND.

Members will see a Do Not Disturb icon next to your name. When sending a direct message, they can override DND to notify you about an urgent message once per day.

When you’re setting a status, you can check a box in that same menu to pause notifications for as long as that status is up. 

Jay Peters, one of the Verge’s news reporters first discovered the checkbox on Thursday, May 20th 2021, while preparing for an interview. 

“When I do interviews or calls, I like to set a status to tell my colleagues what I’m up to and then turn off Slack notifications so I’m not distracted by pings or mentions. Previously, though, pausing notifications required clicking into a second menu — and I’d sometimes forget to turn them off. This new checkbox has the benefit of saving me a bit of time and helping me remember to pause notifications when I need to,” Peters made this statement while reporting on www.theverge.com. 

A spokesperson for Slack told The Verge that this new feature is rolling out now, so users might not have it just yet. 

To find out if you have this feature, head over to the “Set a status” menu, type something in the “What’s your status?” field, and then look under the “Clear after:” menu. You should see a checkbox titled “Pause notifications.” Check that, and when you save your status, you won’t get notifications while the status is live. 

Slack’s new feature is available to all users on desktop, andriod and ios, and on all plans.