How to Use Slack Notification Sounds to Improve Focus and Productivity in Remote Work
I do not change my notification rules during the day. They are the same five at nine in the morning and at six in the evening. What changes is what each one costs me, and building the set around that is most of the trick. Here is a normal Tuesday.
9:00 am
Everything is audible and I am not trying to concentrate yet. This first forty minutes is the pass over whatever arrived overnight from the half of the team that is five hours ahead.
The five sounds, so the rest of the day makes sense. A short chime for direct messages. The same chime at about half volume when my name appears in a project channel. A soft click, very quiet, for routine traffic in the two channels I actually read. A low sustained tone for anything matching #prod-*, which only plays during my on-call week. Silence for everything else, which is most things.
The mechanics behind it are unglamorous. Chirpy is a native macOS menu bar app that reads notifications through the macOS Accessibility API, locally. It never touches the Slack API, so there is no account to connect. Install it, grant the Accessibility permission, set Slack's own notification sound to None so one message does not produce two noises, then write the rules.
9:40 am
Headphones on, first real block of the morning. This is where the soft click earns its place. It tells me something arrived without telling me what, and I have trained myself to not look. If I had nothing at all there, I would check Slack manually every eight minutes, which is worse than the click by a wide margin.
10:55 am
The DM chime. Full volume, obviously different from the click. I break for this one, every time, which is the whole reason it exists as its own tier.
Getting back into a piece of work takes me somewhere around ten to fifteen minutes. That number is the budget. It is why the interrupt tier has exactly three senders and one channel pattern in it and why I refuse to add a fourth.
12:20 pm
Lunch, and macOS Focus is on. No notifications get delivered, so nothing plays. The rules are still sitting there; the operating system simply never hands anything over. This is the quietest hour of the day on purpose, and it is the only hour where I would genuinely rather miss something than hear it.
1:30 pm
Meetings until three. Speakers instead of headphones, screen shared, other people in the room.
Per-rule volume is what makes this bearable. The urgent tone drops to about 40 percent and is still unmistakable to me, while the routine click drops to nothing anyone else can hear. Before I had per-rule volume I muted the whole app for meetings and then forgot to unmute it until four.
2:45 pm
The low tone, mid-meeting. On-call week, so it is mine. I leave the call.
When it is not my week that rule is switched off, and the absence is doing real work. Hearing a production alert you are not responsible for is a small cost paid a dozen times a day for no benefit. Someone else has it.
3:30 pm
Back at the desk, and the half-volume chime goes twice in ten minutes. Two mentions in project channels. Neither needs an answer in the next hour, and the volume difference tells me that before I have looked at the screen.
I batch these. Around four I clear whatever accumulated in one pass, which is one context switch instead of two.
The half-volume tier took the longest to get right. My first attempt gave mentions their own separate sound, and within a week I could not remember which of the two chimes meant what. Reusing one sound at two volumes solved it, because loud and quiet is a distinction nobody has to learn.
4:45 pm
Second block, shorter than the morning one. The click is going more often now because the US side is properly awake, and at this hour it means something different: it is mostly people starting their day, not people waiting on me. Same sound, different reading, no rule change required.
6:00 pm
Slack goes into its own quiet hours and Focus takes over again. What tells me the setup is working is that I can say what happened today without having read any of it in real time. The three things that needed me got me within a minute. The rest waited.
If you want to try this, Chirpy is $19.99 once, not a subscription, with a three-day trial that does not ask for a card and a 30-day money-back guarantee. It needs macOS 13 or later and the download is 7.8 MB. There are 72 sounds built in, and you can drop in your own as .mp3, .wav, or .caf if none of them suit.
Start with two tiers and add the third when you miss it. Chirpy is here.