Working in Microsoft Teams can be like working in a noisy open floor office. Notification banners keep popping up from busy conversations, mentions, task assignments and more. An increasing Activity Feed counter dials up the stress levels to the point where you can’t ignore it and you have to check to see if there is anything important in the feed. In an open floor office, you might put on your close ear headphones or pop in some ear buds to silence the noise. Or at least, choose the noise you want to hear. In Teams, you could use Do Not Disturb or Focus Time to give yourself some room to concentrate. But there’s something you can do to get the notification noise under control.

Use this method and features in Teams to manage the noise and focus on what’s important to you.

1 Start with silence

Make silence your starting point when deciding what notifications you want to receive. Turn each activity off if it helps. Then turn on the notifications one by one for each activity that matters to you.

What do you need to know? What is good to know? What can you do without?

2 What notifications should you always receive?

There are some conversations and activities that you should always receive a notification for. Chats and Teams Channels are the most common place for conversation. Incoming and missed calls. When someone mentions your name in a conversation, they are addressing you. You should know about it so you can respond or be aware of the conversation about you.

Do you need to know when someone reacts to your message or reply? If you have a leadership role, many people may react to your messages. It would be noisy to receive a notification for every reaction. However, some teams use a Like reactions to confirm they have received an instruction or agree with a message. Leave Reactions set to receive notifications. I’ll show you how to mute noisy conversations later.

3 What Teams and channels matter most to you?

Organise your list of Teams and channels to prioritise what matters most to you. What are your most important Teams and channels?

• Your Business Unit?

• Your current projects?

• A work stream that you are responsible for in a project?

• A Centre of Excellence or community where you want to remain engaged?

Use these questions to decide which teams and channels to show, hide, and move to the top of your list.

Show important teams and channels. You will receive notifications when the team or channel is mentioned.

Prioritise teams and channels you want to focus on.

Drag teams you frequently visit into a different order in the list.

Pin important channels to the top of your list. You will see these first when you open Teams.

Hide teams and channels that you don’t need to engage in, but still need access to conversations and content.

Leave teams that you no longer need access to. You can join them again in the future if the need arises.

4 What conversations do you want to follow closely?

Some channels are so important to you that you want to be notified whenever there is any new activity. Set the channel notifications for every new conversation, or for every new conversation and reply. If you set to receive every new conversation and reply for a busy channel, you’re going to receive a lot of notifications. Use this only for a channel when you truly want to be made aware of all conversation in a channel. If the channel is used for announcements, posting questions or requests for help, it might be good to be notified about every new conversation.

When you start a conversation or reply to one, you will receive notifications for each reply. This is good when you need to keep up with the discussion. You can also follow a conversation and get notifications without replying and joining it. On the first post of the conversation, use the ellipses menu and choose ‘Turn on notifications’.

5 What conversations do you no longer want to follow closely?

Remember earlier when we talked about busy conversations? They can send you a lot of notifications. You might have started a popular conversation. Or joined one.

Mute chats and conversations in team channels that you don’t want to follow anymore. You can catch up with the conversation later.

Mute chats with individuals and groups. This includes meeting chats, which are a group chat associated to a meeting.

Don’t worry. If someone talks about you or to you and @mentions you, you will receive that notification.

Leave chats