How to Use Slack Notification Sounds to Improve Team Decision-Making in Remote Work
Most notification setups are the accumulated residue of whatever people clicked when they joined a channel. Nobody decided any of it. The fix is a table you fill in once, argue about for twenty minutes, and then apply.
One question decides the tier
For any notification, ask: who has to act on this within the hour?
If the answer is a specific named person and that person is you, it earns an interrupt. If the answer is "someone, eventually, and it would be useful to know it happened," it earns a quiet marker. If the answer is "nobody," it earns silence. Three tiers, no fourth, because a fourth tier means you will spend your time sorting rather than working.
The reason this works better than sorting by importance is that importance is unarguable in the abstract. Everything in a production channel is important. Not everything in a production channel needs the person reading it to stop what they are doing.
The default table
This is the version I hand people as a starting point. Adjust the channel names, keep the shape.
| Notification type | Who has to act within the hour | Sound treatment |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Alert in #prod-* | The on-call engineer only | Interrupt. Low sustained tone at full volume. Everyone off rotation sets this rule to silent. |
| Direct message from a teammate | The recipient | Interrupt. Short chime, distinct from everything else. |
| @here in an active incident channel | Everyone in the incident | Interrupt. Same tone as the prod alert. |
| Your name mentioned in a project channel | You, but usually not this hour | Marker. The DM chime at roughly half volume. |
| #support-escalations containing "outage" or "data loss" | The support lead | Interrupt. Keyword AND channel, not keyword alone. |
| Review requested on your PR | The named reviewer, today | Marker. Soft click. |
| CI passing, deploy bot output, changelog feeds | Nobody | Silent. Read it when you go looking. |
| Standup reminders, calendar bots, digest posts | Nobody | Silent. |
| Any channel you joined for context | Nobody | Silent, and consider leaving. |
The row that causes the most argument is the fourth one. People want their own name to be an interrupt everywhere. It cannot be, or the tier means nothing by Wednesday.
Building your own in five steps
- Collect a week. Write down every notification you got over five working days and group them into types. Ten to fifteen types is normal. Fewer means you are grouping too coarsely.
- Name an owner per type. One person or one role, and be honest about the hour. "The team" is not an answer.
- Assign a tier. Interrupt, marker, or silent. If more than about a fifth of your types land in the interrupt tier, go back and be stricter.
- Write the rules. In Chirpy, each row becomes a rule matching on app, channel, person, or keyword, combined with AND/OR. Wildcards handle families of channels, so
#prod-* covers #prod-alerts and #prod-deploys in one rule.
- Review after two weeks. You will have got two or three rows wrong. Move them.
Order matters
Rules are evaluated by priority, so the specific ones have to sit above the catch-alls. A silent rule for a whole channel placed above a keyword rule for that channel will swallow the keyword rule and you will spend an afternoon wondering why the urgent tone never fires.
Volume is part of the decision
A marker at 20 percent and an interrupt at 100 percent can use the same sound file and still be unmistakable. Per-rule volume means you need fewer distinct sounds than you think, which matters because most people cannot reliably tell apart more than about five.
Before any of this works, one bit of setup: Chirpy is a native macOS menu bar app that reads notifications through the Accessibility API on your own machine. There is nothing to authorize in Slack. Install it, grant the Accessibility permission, then set Slack's own notification sound to None so you are not hearing two sounds for one message.
Fill in the table for your own team, then build the rules with Chirpy.