Tame app notifications, boost your digital wellness

If the “ping” of app notifications gives you a little feeling of exasperation or even dread, let’s fix that.

Think about it — do you need to be notified for every Teams message? Unlikely. Does a “ping” improve your Outlook experience? Maybe not.

Let’s dig into Microsoft Teams and Outlook settings to help you tame app notifications. Tackling your app notifications can help boost your digital wellness, since digital wellness is all about finding a healthy balance with technology. And feeling dread when you hear a notification definitely isn’t a healthy balance.

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Audit and customize Teams notifications

With Microsoft Teams, you can customize your notifications. In your app settings, you can remove sounds, choose the frequency of missed activity emails and pick notifications for @mentions and likes and reactions.

To customize, choose Settings, then open the notifications section. Then, go down the list and think about what you do — and don’t — want Teams to ping you about. For example, you can probably disable notifications for when someone likes a message without harming your Teams experience!

Then, dive deeper and customize your channel notifications. For each channel, you can decide if you want to be notified for all posts, replies, when someone @mentions the channel or choose no notifications at all. You can also decide if you want notifications sent to your device (banner and feeds) or appear only within your Teams activity feed.

With that in mind, do an audit and decide what works best for each channel — knowing you can easily make changes later.

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Consider if you can disable notifications for all Teams except your most essential channels and skim the others when you have time. And even for those essential channels, you may not need notifications when people reply to threads that you’re not participating in. We’re all worried about missing notifications but think of this as an opportunity to cut down the noise — literally — and prioritize the important things.

And the good news is that these settings and channel customizations carry over to the Teams mobile app. And there are additional choices for mobile app notifications that may help you feel less overwhelmed, like limiting notifications to chat and @mentions only and blocking mobile notifications while you’re in meetings or active on another device.

Tame Outlook email notifications

With Outlook, the notification types differ by the operating system and Outlook version, but you have options.

Outlook includes multiple methods of notification for the same new email — like sounds, desktop alerts, icon bounces and icon badges — which can be very distracting. Consider choosing just one or two types of notification so you don’t feel overwhelmed with each incoming email.

You can also use Outlook Rules to tame your notifications. Rules are automated actions that Outlook takes on your messages. They help manage your inbox by automatically organizing, filtering, or deleting your emails.

To make a Rule, you set criteria, like a sender or subject line. When messages match what you’ve set, Outlook takes a specified action on the message. Crucially, you can use Rules to reduce notifications by having Outlook delete some emails or move low-priority messages like newsletters to folders that won’t trigger a new mail notification. For more help from Microsoft, visit Set up Rules.

Focus on what’s important

Have you tried Focused Inbox in Outlook? With Focused Inbox enabled, Microsoft sorts your mail into two tabs — focused and other — helping surface your most important emails.

With Focused Inbox on, Microsoft analyzes your messages moves important emails to the Focused tab to help you prioritize, but don’t neglect your Other tab. Microsoft analyzes how you interact with your messages, so the more you use your Focused Inbox, the smarter it gets, but you can also select a message and right click it to tell Microsoft how to handle a type of message moving forward.

Depending on your version of Outlook, you may also be able to customize notifications and choose if you only want to be notified for new mail in your focused inbox. For more information, visit Focused Inbox for Outlook (Windows, Outlook.com), Focused Inbox for Outlook (Mac) or Focused Inbox for Outlook (Mobile).

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Quiet hours and quiet days

Installing work apps on your personal devices can be a great way to stay plugged in. However, those apps can also keep you from fully disengaging when your work hours are over.

To mute your mobile app notifications when you’re taking a break or off the clock, set daily quiet hours or enable do not disturb in the Outlook and Microsoft Teams apps.

For Outlook, use Do Not Disturb mode to snooze notifications. In the Outlook app, tap the menu in the upper left, then the alarm clock icon in the upper right. You can choose between either timed, such as by day, or scheduled periods, such as during appointments. There are easy toggles for disabling notifications on weekends or evenings.

For Teams, choose either Quiet Hours or Quiet Days. In the app, tap your profile, choose Notifications from the main menu. Then, configure how and when Teams should disable notifications to your device.

And of course, you can choose to disable all app notifications from Outlooks or Teams. Your apps will still be there if you need them and manually opening apps may help you be more mindful about engaging with work.

Want more tips and tricks? ITS has another tool that can help: LinkedIn Learning. Log in for free using your Onyen and search for courses on specific software, like Outlook, or on keywords like “digital wellness” to find the right course for you. Options range from one-minute quick tips to 10-hour master classes.