Set working hours for notifications in Slack

Slack at 9:30 pm is almost never urgent. And yet your phone treats every notification with the same urgency as if the building were on fire — evening after evening, pulling you out of whatever you're doing. Fortunately you don't have to solve this with willpower or constantly muting your phone by hand; Slack lets you set a notification schedule once and then stop thinking about it. The difference between “I'll turn off notifications when I remember to” and an automatic schedule is exactly the difference between something that works occasionally and something that works every time.

A typical scenario

Colleague Petr has a habit of typing up ideas late at night, because that's when he's most productive. His messages land on colleagues' phones at 10 pm, and even though they're not urgent, the notification still lights up the screen and pulls them away from a movie or their kids.

With a notification window set, Slack simply doesn't deliver those messages until working hours start again. Petr can write whenever he wants, and colleagues get a morning summary without anything disturbing their evening. Nobody has to keep track of when “working hours” end and begin — the system handles it reliably for everyone.

How to do it

1. Click your profile in the top right and find Notifications → Notification schedule.
2. Set the days of the week and hours when you actually want to receive notifications — say, weekdays from eight to five, nothing on weekends.
3. Outside the set windows, Slack doesn't deliver notifications at all; once working hours start again, it catches you up with what you missed.
4. The setting applies across every device linked to your account, so you don't have to rely on manually turning off notifications on your phone every single evening.
5. If your working hours are irregular, set separate windows for each day of the week — a Wednesday with a late meeting can have a different window than a quiet Friday.

The best tools

• Slack's built-in notification schedule — set it once and it works automatically, with nothing more to think about.
• Focus / Do Not Disturb modes on your operating system (iOS Focus, Windows Focus Assist) — quiet all apps at once, not just Slack, useful as a broader complement.
• Linking your Slack status to your calendar — connect a Google or Outlook calendar and your status automatically switches to “Busy” during meetings, so colleagues can see you're not reachable right then.
• A morning routine of scanning what you missed — five minutes after arriving at work to go through what came in overnight keeps your inbox under control without having to monitor it in the evening.

What you get out of it

• A calmer evening: your phone doesn't pull you away from anything you're doing outside work.
• Better sleep: no last-minute message check before bed “just to make sure nothing's on fire.”
• A clear boundary for colleagues: they can see when you're reachable and don't expect a reply outside that window.
• A clear mind, no guilt: you know a genuinely urgent matter will still reach you, so you don't have to worry about missing something.
• Respected personal time: colleagues see your notification schedule and naturally adjust to it, without you having to bring it up in conversation.

Pro tip

If something's genuinely urgent: the sender can choose Notify anyway on a specific message and deliver it despite your schedule. Real urgency always gets through — the schedule only blocks routine traffic, not exceptions, so you don't have to worry about shutting yourself off from truly important things.