Hello, my name's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
Are you constantly being hassled by Teams notifications?
The more we use Teams, the more activity there is,
the more notifications we get.
But all the feed activity - the banners and the pinging sounds -
can get a little overwhelming at times.
So in this video,
I'm going to share some tips on how to manage the noise that Teams makes.
We'll look at how you can mute your chats,
silence those disruptive channels,
and prevent activity overload.
First of all let's talk about what types of notification we have in Teams.
There are two - the banner
and the feed.
The most irritating is the banner so let's start there.
The banner pops up on the right hand side of your desktop
to notify you that something has happened in Teams.
Banners can be from Teams (which are the purple ones),
or they can use the Windows or Mac notification system.
Both banner types have their own distinctly annoying sound.
The activity feed is the app in the top left corner of Teams.
Every time something happens in Teams it will update the red counter
and show you how much activity you've missed.
This is much less intrusive but can be distracting
to see your feed with tons of activity.
Most of the time that activity isn't really anything you need to know about anyway.
Using the notification settings and other tricks in Teams,
you can control all the sounds, banners and activity
and make it work for you.
Let's turn that sound off to start with.
Go to the activity feed app - and that's usually in the top left corner of Teams.
Choose the settings wheel, and that will take you to the notifications page.
Toggle the "play sound for incoming calls and notifications" to "off".
Now when the banner slides in it won't make a sound
and you will instantly begin to feel calmer.
So now that's turned off
we can concentrate on the other notification settings in Teams.
You'll notice on this page I can also apply settings to all the channels in Teams
from this "Teams and channels" section.
First I want to make sure that it's set to "customised".
That way I can control which notifications I see.
This option on the left - "all activity"-
means that I see everything that happens in Teams.
All messages, reactions and replies,
and that really would be activity overload so I don't want that.
This one labelled "mentions and replies" is better
because you're only notified with the banner and in the feed...
...for personal mentions and replies to messages that you created,
so they'll usually be relevant.
This is good if I want to go a step further.
If I choose "customised" however,
I can then select what I want to see for each different type of activity in Teams.
"Banner and feed" is the default.
I want to be notified with the banner for @mentions, team mentions and replies
so I'll leave those as they are.
"Likes and reactions" I'm going to set to "feed only".
Although they're nice to see, there are lots of them because people react a lot
with thumbs and hearts and smiles because it's so easy
which is great, but I don't want to see a banner popping out every time someone reacts
so I'm going to set this to "feed only".
I'll make sure that "all new posts" is set to "off".
You don't need to be notified
every single time something is posted to your team.
So that's how we set channel notifications for all of Teams,
but it could be that there's a channel where you want to be notified...
...either more or less often.
Perhaps your team conversations about a certain topic are really important to you,
and for that reason we can set notifications on individual channels.
To do that, just choose the channel
and I'll choose the "general" channel here in the marketing team,
and then I go to the ellipsis and I choose "channel notifications".
Notice that this channel is set to "customised",
and that's because I just set all my channels to "customised".
If I click on "customised" here, I can make a change to the settings.
However, because I really care about what everyone says on this particular channel,
and I need to respond to it quickly,
I'm going to set this channel to "all activity"
and be notified whenever something happens.
And alternatively, if I switch to the campaign channel
and go to "channel notifications",
now, I don't work on this particular campaign,
and the conversations that go on inside of this channel aren't really important to me
so I don't really want to see many notifications
so I'm going to set this one to "off".
As well as channel messages
I can also control the notifications I see when I'm involved in chats.
All my chats are listed in the chat app here
and every time there's activity there
I'll see a banner or a feed notification.
To change the chat settings
I can go to the activity app and choose the settings wheel again
and when I do that, I can go to the "chat" section and then choose "edit".
Now I've got three things that I can change:
"@mentions", "messages", and "likes and reactions".
I want to turn off all my banner notifications for chat
so I'm going to set "@mentions" to "only show in feed",
"messages" to "off",
and "likes and reactions" to "only show in feed".
Now I won't get any banner messages for chat at all.
You can also mute individual chats.
This is good if you have a busy chat and you want to stop it from notifying you
every time there's an update.
Notice that this chat with Polly is in bold because there's an update
and if I right-click it, I can choose mute.
Notice that the icon for that chat
turns into a gray bell icon with a line through it
and the little red indicator decreases because that chat is on mute,
and if I unmute it, the red indicator goes up one again.
So mute is great when you just want a single chat to go quiet for a while.
My last tip is about meeting settings.
Seeing a banner when a meeting starts is actually really useful.
This can be the notification that saves you from missing a meeting.
So when someone starts a meeting it pops up and you can use it to join.
Meeting banners should be on by default,
and if you want to check how yours is set,
go to the meeting notification settings by choosing the activity app
and choose the settings wheel.
Then go to the meeting section and choose "edit".
Here I can see that my "meeting started" notification is set to "banner",
and that's perfect so I don't want to change it.
Okay so there are my tips on how to set your notifications in Teams
to avoid activity overload.
Let me know what you think,
and thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you next time.
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