How to Use Slack Notification Sounds to Improve Team Collaboration in Remote Work
Eight things to actually go and do. Half of them are conversations, not settings.
Before you touch any settings
1. Name the three channels your team genuinely coordinates in
Write them down. Most teams have twenty channels and coordinate in three. Everything you do afterwards applies to those three, and the other seventeen get silence by default. Skipping this step is how people end up with fifteen rules and no idea which ones matter.
2. Ask everyone which channels they have already muted
Ask it directly, in a way that makes clear nobody is in trouble for the answer. A muted channel is the clearest signal you will get about where the noise is, and people generally will not volunteer it because it feels like an admission. If one of your three coordination channels is on someone's muted list, that is the problem to fix first.
Set it up
3. Install Chirpy and grant the Accessibility permission
Chirpy is a native macOS menu bar app, 7.8 MB, macOS 13 or later. It reads notifications through the macOS Accessibility API on the machine itself, so there is no Slack account to link, nothing to authorize in your workspace, and no admin approval to wait on. Grant the permission in System Settings and it starts working.
4. Set Slack's own notification sound to None
Do this before writing any rules. Otherwise every message plays Slack's default sound and yours on top of it, you conclude the whole idea does not work, and you uninstall by lunchtime.
5. Give direct messages one sound and everything else a quieter one
Two rules. This is the version to ship to the team first, because it takes ninety seconds and delivers most of the benefit. People who want a fifteen-rule setup will build one on their own; people who do not will still be better off than they were.
Keep the loud one short. Anything longer than about half a second, or anything with a tune, stops being information and starts being an irritant somewhere around the fortieth hearing, and you will hear it more often than that in a month.
6. Add a wildcard rule for your alert channels
One rule matching #prod-* or #alerts-* covers the whole family, and you switch it off in the weeks you are not on call. Listening to alerts that belong to someone else is a cost paid all day for nothing, and it makes the on-call person's alerts less distinct when it is your turn.
7. Order the rules so specific matches sit above catch-alls
Rules are evaluated in priority order. A silent rule for an entire channel placed above a keyword rule for that same channel will swallow it. If a sound you configured never fires, this is almost always why.
Two weeks later
8. Ask one question in your retro
"What did you hear this fortnight that you did not need to hear?" Then delete those rules on the spot rather than putting it on a list. The list of sounds should get shorter over time. If it is getting longer, the categories were wrong and it is worth redoing step one.
The one thing worth agreeing on as a team is the categories, not the sounds themselves. Once people know which kinds of message are allowed to interrupt someone, let everyone pick whatever they want inside those categories. There are 72 sounds built in and you can add your own as .mp3, .wav, or .caf.
Work through the eight and you will have a setup your team can explain to a new joiner in one message. Chirpy is $19.99 once, with a three-day trial.