Slack’s new Do Not Disturb feature lets you snooze notifications

Slack has officially released its Do Not Disturb mode to its 2 million daily active users, giving them more control over when they want to receive notifications from the system. Once enabled, all notifications and associated sounds will be muted on any device, and your teammates will see a corresponding icon, should they try to message you.  You can specify how long you want this mode to remain active.

The update, which was first reported by The Next Web, is part of Slack’s efforts to make our work lives more collaborative, while bearing in mind that there are some occasions when you just need to focus on the task at hand.

To enable Do Not Disturb, you can either click the bell icon by your team name and choose how long you’d like to remain undisturbed or type in the /dnd slash command (e.g. /dnd 20 minutes). Slack stated that when it’s time for you to interact with your colleagues, it’ll provide you with a short summary of the number of new notifications you received while you were away.

Should an emergency arise, Slack has added a quick option that will send a notification through, though the company cautions that this should be used sparingly. After all, its abuse could result in a very unhappy work environment.

You can schedule regular times when you’d rather not be disturbed, say, before and after work. Administrators can also override all Do Not Disturb modes for the team if it gets out of hand.

This new feature is available on all of Slack’s apps, including the Web, desktop, iOS, and Android devices.

The release of Do Not Disturb comes just days after the company opened up an App Directory, an $80 million developer fund, and even introduced an open source framework for third-parties to create their own bots. So as more cloud-based applications integrate themselves into Slack, there’s going to need to be a way for users to manage all the notifications they receive, not just from individual teams, channels, and colleagues, but also from the various services that have been connected to their Slack instance.