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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Tips for Managing Information Overload in Slack
Take control of Slack notifications with simple strategies like muting channels, using threads, and saving important messages to boost your focus
Feeling overwhelmed by Slack notifications?
You’re not alone. While Slack is a powerful communication tool, it can quickly become a source of distraction and stress if left unmanaged. Channels multiply, messages flood in, and before you know it, you’re spending more time triaging updates than doing actual work.
In this post, we’ll share practical, low-effort strategies to help you regain control, so you can stay focused on what matters most.
Aggressively mute and/or leave channels
There’s a good chance that you are in way more Slack channels than you can reasonably keep up with. The easiest solution to this problem is to aggressively leave or mute channels that aren’t core to your work.
If you’re hesitant to leave a channel, relax; someone can (and will) always add you back if they really need you for something
If you’re not quite ready to cut the cord and leave, muting channels is great too. When you mute a channel, you won’t receive any notifications unless you’re mentioned, and the channel will appear greyed out in your sidebar (again, unless you’re mentioned). This is much less distracting, and you shouldn’t miss out on anything where you’re specifically needed.
Use threads - and unsubscribe when they’re no longer useful
Threads seem annoying at first. But using threads allows people to decide which conversations they want to be part of. It also prevents channels from becoming a series of overlapping conversations. With threads, only the people who want to participate in the conversation need to see anything beyond the initial message.
Respond to a thread and you'll be notified when other people do, thanks to the Threads section in the sidebar. People who don't respond to the thread won't see anything.
If we all use threads more, it makes it easier for us to mute non-core channels. We’ll get notified if someone replies to a message we posted via a thread, but we don’t have to receive notifications for every message in the channel.
And when a thread is no longer relevant, you can unsubscribe from it so you won’t receive notifications for replies anymore.
Declutter your sidebar
Slack allows you to organise the channels in your sidebar into sections. In addition to making channels easier to find, this also allows you to expand or collapse each section, and to configure sections so that only channels with unread messages show up in the sidebar, allowing you to quickly find and triage anything you need to deal with.
Save actionable items
Need to follow up on a Slack message you saw before you had your morning coffee, and now you have no idea how to find it? There are a few easy ways to deal with that.
Caveperson method: Mark the message unread
The lazy way is to just mark the message unread right after you read it, so that you’ll know to come look at it again later.
The main problem with this approach is that you are 100% going to forget that you marked this message as unread, so you will end up looking at it again, not dealing with it again, you’ll forget to re-mark it as unread, and then it’s lost forever.
Moderately acceptable method: Save the message for later
Slack has a built-in feature for saving messages for later, which has gotten better over the years. Now, when you save a message, there’s a handy section in your sidebar for Later, where you can quickly find anything you’ve saved, and mark it as Done.
Power user method: Save the message as a Notion task
If you use Notion to track projects and tasks, you can create a new Task from any Slack message (once you’ve installed the Notion ↔ Slack integration) by clicking on the
More actions vertical ellipsis on the top right of the message, and then clicking on Create task in Notion. (If you don’t see it at first, click first on More message shortcuts).
Slack doesn’t have to be a source of stress. With just a few small changes - muting non-essential channels, using threads properly, organising your sidebar, and saving important messages - you can drastically cut down the noise and reclaim your focus. These habits take minutes to set up but can save you hours of context-switching and mental clutter every week.
Need help setting up Slack to work for you, not against you?
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