Slack’s newest feature will help me remember to pause notifications before calls

Slack has added a small but very welcome new feature: when you’re setting a status, you can check a box in that same menu to pause notifications for as long as that status is up.

I discovered the checkbox on Thursday while preparing for an interview. When I do interviews or calls, I like to set a status to tell my colleagues what I’m up to and then turn off Slack notifications so I’m not distracted by pings or mentions. Previously, though, pausing notifications required clicking into a second menu — and I’d sometimes forget to turn them off. This new checkbox has the benefit of saving me a bit of time and helping me remember to pause notifications when I need to.

Slack tells The Verge that this feature is rolling out now, so you might not have it just yet. If you want to see if you do, go to the “Set a status” menu, type something in the “What’s your status?” field, and then look under the “Clear after:” menu. You should see a checkbox titled “Pause notifications.” Check that, and when you save your status, you won’t get notifications while the status is live.

There’s been a fair amount of Slack news within the last day or so. Earlier on Thursday, Slack had an outage that lasted for more than an hour. And on Wednesday, Slack introduced a pronouns field for profiles.