How to set quiet hours and your default chat level

What buzzes you, on your account page, is where you shape what reaches your devices. Two settings do most of the work: quiet hours, and your default for channels.

How do you set quiet hours?

Turn Quiet hours on and set the from and to times. They default to 22:00 to 07:00 and move in 30-minute steps.

The window can wrap past midnight, which is the normal case, and it is read in your own timezone. That timezone is captured from the browser you last saved in.

If you travel and your quiet hours seem wrong, save the settings again from a browser in your current timezone.

What do quiet hours actually do?

They drop notifications rather than holding them.

A one-off ping sent at 3am is gone: it does not arrive at seven. A recurring reminder, such as a task nearing its due date, simply fires again later, so it is not lost.

That sounds harsh and is the right choice. A queue of overnight buzzes arriving at breakfast is worse than the silence, and the record is in your Inbox either way. See How to see what needs you.

Quiet hours apply on top of everything else, including a channel you have set to notify you about every message.

What is the default for channels?

What happens in any chat channel you have not set individually. Three choices:

• Every message. Sensible only if you are in very few channels.
• Mentions & replies only. The right default for almost everybody.
• Nothing. No chat push at all, and you catch up when you look.

Start at Mentions & replies only, then raise the level on the two or three channels that genuinely need your attention. Doing it that way round produces far fewer notifications than starting loud and muting.

Setting a level on an individual channel overrides this default, per How to mute or follow a channel.

Which alerts have their own switch?

Three: Task reminders, Low-stock alerts and Notable order alerts. Each is a hard on/off for that category on your devices.

Everything else, including chat, comments, approvals and workflow notifications, is shaped by quiet hours and channel levels rather than by a per-type switch. See How to control task, stock and order alerts.

Do these settings stop the alert entirely?

No. They silence pushes to your devices only.

The Inbox item still arrives and any email still sends. Turning off low-stock buzzes means you find out when you look rather than when it happens, which is often exactly what you want.

Can an admin change these for me?

No. These are personal, nobody else's are affected, and an admin cannot set yours.

What an admin can do is stop a category upstream, by switching off the module it belongs to or turning off the automation that produces it. See How to turn an automation on, off, or run it now.

Can you set these on the phone?

Yes. The iPhone app has the same notification settings screen, and it writes the same settings as the web.

Change them in either place and both follow.