Even though we love our ability to communicate with the world, a large part of our day still requires focus and concentration and constant messaging can get in the way of our focus. One way to lower our communications overload is to add control and priority in each of your communications channels.
Below is a breakdown of how we can add more control to our communications.
- Emails:
Many times we get a large number of emails, but of those emails, we receive only a few are very important. One idea is to send all important and priority emails to Slack. This way we do not miss important messages if we are in focus mode and had closed our email. - Social Media:
We can turn down social media notifications so we only get security and admin notifications only and placed an auto-reply notice with a support email so visitors can email me if there is urgency. - Slack*:
Each Slack group has its own notification setting based on urgency. This way we have more focus, but we still get to our urgent email and project notifications, We can then close everything except Slack. - Growl Notifications:
If we really need to focus for a few hours. We can mute my notification bar by option click on the OS X notifications in the upper right-hand corner. By doing this we turn off all our desktop notifications for a few hours based on its setting.
If we take an hour to adjust our notification controls we can add more piece of mind and focus our work. Please let me know what you think or if you have any of your own suggestions. Have an amazing day!
* For those of us that may not know, Slack is a piece of software that is highly recommended for team communication. It comes with a lite version for free that is free to use. For more information on Slack visit their site: https://slack.com