Stop Drowning in Notifications

There is a new feature rolling out to Teams to allow you to mute most Teams notifications when you are in a meeting or on a call.

You can either switch it on for all meetings on on a meeting by meeting basis.

To mute for all meetings and calls go to Settings, choose Notifications then click the Edit button next to Meetings and Calls, you will then see the screen below where you need to switch the toggle to on for Mute notifications during meetings and calls

To mute notifications in a single meeting, open the menu from the … on the meeting toolbar and choose Mute notifications.

As I regularly work as a guest in different tenants, and when training mostly need meeting notifications on, I have found the per meeting option the best for me.

All notification settings are per organisation, so if you do find yourself switching tenants (organisations) a lot you should either use the per meeting setting or change the notification settings in each organisation.

Another tactic to consider is muting individual chats. This can be especially helpful when in a large meeting with an active meeting chat. To mute the one chat, go to the Chat app in Teams and locate the meeting chat then click the … on that conversation and choose Mute from the chat menu, as shown below.

If you haven’t already had a look at the notification settings in Teams, please do. Especially if you are downing in notifications a few simple changes could make them a lot more useful.

Start with the main settings menu from the … on the Teams app title bar and then choose Notifications.

Next consider customising notifications in channels within each Team. For example, you could change the settings so that you receive notification from important channels for all activity and on busy channels for only items where you are mentioned.

To edit notification settings for a single channel, from the … menu for the channel choose channel notifications and Customised then edit the settings. Or instead of Customised you could choose All Activity (for notifications of all activity) or Off (for no notification except direct replies and mentions using your name)

For accessibility, I have included descriptive image captions in this article, rather than alt text. I hope to make the image descriptors available to all in this way. However I do not use a screen reader. If you do, please let me know if this works well or not.