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With 275.000 people using Chat, we get MANY notifications. Unless we deal with them in a smart way, Chat may overwhelm us and we will resent an amazing tool. Good news: Chat just got new notification preferences that restore your sanity.
Hi! I've got a question about the TPS report. If only you could prioritize chat notifications - now you can.
Chat's notification model
Chat's notification model
Notifications - what is important
Notifications - what is important
Chat notifies you about important messages - others simply will be received (and conversations marked as unread), but Chat will not send you notifications. There are configuration options to tell Chat what is important. This article will be about this fine tuning.
Status
Status
By temporarily setting yourself to "Do not disturb", you will not receive any notification.
Chat is an online service, like email. You will always continue receiving messages.
Push messages? Chimes? Pop ups?
Push messages? Chimes? Pop ups?
You can configure what you want Chat to do when an important message arrives.
The options differ depending on whether you are using the website, your phone etc. We will look at this in an upcoming post.
Customizing important messages
Customizing important messages
You configure message importance per conversation, that is per direct message/group/chat room. The option is called "Notifications" and can have these values:
Notify always: Notifies about every single message.
This is the default setting for new conversations, making sure that you do not miss out. Simple.Notify less: Only notifies where someone mentions you (@Holger, or @all) will be important. It will also notify you about messages in followed threads, and for the first message in new threads. This is the most complicated (but the most useful) setting, and we will have to talk about it below.
As direct messages are always personal, this level is not available to them. So direct messages switch between notifications on/off.Notifications off: Never notifies you.
Followed threads
Followed threads
When chat rooms get busy, you might not be interested in all ongoing conversations. You can set those rooms as "less notifications" and be notified only about conversation threads you follow - sending a message in a conversation makes you follow a thread. You can also manually follow and unfollow. It is the equivalent of muting for Gmail.
As with everything about notifications, following is personal. You cannot see who is following a thread and you cannot see who read your message. Read status ("chat heads") is only available in 1:1 messages.
Notification dots
Notification dots
When a conversation contains unread messages, its title is displayed in bold font. When it contains messages that you have determined are important, Chat will display the number of threads with important messages. That is a weird way of counting, but what would you rather see: "Look at (2) threads" or "(48) unread messages"? Chat continues Gmail's model of grouping relevant conversations as one.
So:
getting any amount of messages counts as (1)
chat rooms with threads can have a higher count - (1) for each thread you care about.
The pro way of dealing with (lots of) chat messages
The pro way of dealing with (lots of) chat messages
It is absolutely possible to waste time with Chat, just like with any tool. For you to dominate the tool, not to be dominated by it, I suggest you consciously adopt a personal information strategy. The email of reducing your email consumption to a couple of times a day and getting to zero every 1-2 days would be:
Disable pings, pop-ups and do not keep Chat visible at all times
Use the Notify less setting in chat rooms and group messages, even mute some chatty people. They will not know.
From time to time, such as between meetings, check if you have conversations with notification dots and answer only those messages. Leave other conversations alone, they will fill up quickly again
Only when you decide it's time to read the rest of your messages, read all of them.
A followed and an unfollowed thread in the same chat room.
A direct message with unread messages (counts as 1 thread) and a chat room with 2 unread threads.
If you are asking yourself if Chat has become more aggressive notifying - yes. The preferences have changed, they used to be somewhat like "notify always/less/never" per platform. That default is now gone, any new conversation starts out as "notify always", but now you can customize what's important per conversation. You are probably an AI model by doing this - this will likely be suggested for you soon.
We will have to come back and talk about Windows, iOS and Android settings next week. Until then, play with the settings and find out what you like to be notified about, and what you can do without. Thank you for reading!
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Published 2021-04-06 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2021-04-06 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Kid Francescoli - Moon (and it went like)
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