There's a specific way a work tool loses your trust: it pings you for everything, so you learn to check nothing. Every status change, every comment on a thread you glanced at once, every board you happen to watch — all of it lands in the same red badge. After a week your brain does the only sensible thing and starts treating the badge as background noise. Then a real @mention — someone actually blocked, waiting on you — sits unread for three hours, and the tool that was supposed to keep the team in sync has quietly done the opposite.
The instinct most people reach for is to turn notifications off. That works right up until you miss the one that mattered, panic, and turn everything back on. Off and on are both wrong, because the problem was never volume in the abstract — it's that the important and the ignorable arrive through the same channel, at the same loudness, demanding the same attention. The fix isn't fewer notifications or more. It's routing: deciding, ahead of time, which events deserve to interrupt you now, which can wait for a daily digest, and which you never needed to know about at all.
This post is a practical way to think about that routing, and how to set it up so the alerts you get are the ones you'd actually want to be interrupted for.
Three tiers: interrupt, batch, ignore
Almost every notification a work tool can send falls into one of three tiers. Sorting your events into them is the whole game.
- Interrupt — someone is blocked on you specifically, right now. A direct @mention, an issue assigned to you, a review requested, a comment on a task you own. These are worth a real-time ping, because the cost of a three-hour delay is someone else stalled. This tier should be small. If everything is an interrupt, nothing is.
- Batch — you want to know, but not this second. Activity on issues you follow, movement in your team's sprint, comments on threads you're part of but don't own. None of it is urgent; all of it is useful context. This belongs in a once- or twice-a-day digest you read on your schedule, not the tool's.
- Ignore — events you subscribed to by accident or inertia. Every status change on a 40-issue board. Bot comments. The project you helped with once last quarter and still "watch." You don't need these at all, and every one you kill makes the other two tiers louder by contrast.
The mistake is treating the tier as a property of the event type — "comments are batch, mentions are interrupt." It's really a property of the event's relationship to you. A comment on a task you own is an interrupt; the same comment on a task you're cc'd on is batch. Good notification settings let you draw that line per project and per type, not just globally.
Here's the same idea as a quick reference:
| Tier | Trigger | Channel | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interrupt | Blocked on you now | In-app + push | @mention, assigned to you, review requested |
| Batch | Useful, not urgent | Daily digest / email | Followed issues, sprint activity, cc'd threads |
| Ignore | Noise | Off | Board-wide status churn, bots, stale watches |
Set it up once, per project
The reason most people never tune their notifications is that the tool makes it an all-or-nothing global switch, so the only moves are "loud" and "silent." The unlock is granular, per-project rules — because your relationship to your projects genuinely differs. The service you're on call for should interrupt you; the internal wiki you occasionally edit should not.
In Notifications the rules are per-project and per-type across three channels — in-app, email and push — so you can compose exactly the routing above. A workable starting configuration for most people:
- Your one or two active projects: @mentions and assignments → push. Everything else → in-app only, no push. This is where interrupts should come from, and almost nowhere else.
- Projects you follow but don't drive: turn push off entirely. Let updates collect in-app and skim them when you choose. Email digest on if you like a morning summary.
- Everything else: unwatch it. If you can't remember why you're subscribed, that's your answer.
- @mentions, everywhere: always on, always push. A direct mention is the one signal you never want buried, regardless of project — it's how a teammate says "I need you, specifically."
Set this once and the badge starts meaning something again. When it lights up, it's because something you configured as worth-interrupting happened — not because a board you forgot about moved a card.
Make @mentions a real signal, not a reflex
Routing only works if the loudest tier stays honest, and that's a team habit as much as a settings screen. If people @mention the whole team out of caution, or ping you to say "thanks," the interrupt tier inflates until it's noise again — and no amount of per-project tuning saves you.
A few conventions keep mentions meaningful:
- Mention a person only when you need that person. For "anyone could pick this up," leave it in the thread or assign it, don't mention five people and hope.
- Put the ask in the mention. "@sam can you approve the migration plan by EOD?" respects the interrupt far more than "@sam thoughts?" — one is answerable, the other is another thing to open.
- Use assignment, not mention, for ownership. If you want someone to own a task, assign it. An assignment is a durable state on the issue; a mention is a moment that scrolls away.
This is the async counterpart to deciding which meetings to keep or kill: both are really about protecting attention. A meeting interrupts everyone in the room; a bad @mention interrupts one person, but you send far more of them. Threaded comments kept on the issue mean most discussion never needs to interrupt anyone in the first place — it's there, attached to the work, waiting for whoever opens the task next.
The five-minute reset
You don't need a system to start — you need to stop the bleeding. Spend five minutes:
- Turn off push for every project except the one or two you actively drive. This alone removes most of the pings that trained you to ignore the badge.
- Unwatch three projects you don't remember subscribing to. There are always three.
- Confirm @mentions and direct assignments are on, on push. These are your keep-signal; make sure the reset didn't mute them too.
- Set an email digest if you like a single morning pass over the batch tier instead of a live in-app feed.
The goal isn't a quiet tool — a silent tool is as useless as a screaming one. The goal is a tool whose notifications you believe, so that when it interrupts you, you look. A well-tuned feed also pairs with good filters and saved searches: notifications tell you what changed, filters let you go find the rest on your own terms, and between the two you stop living inside a badge.
Notifications should earn the interruption, not spend it on everything. Notifications gives you real-time in-app alerts, threaded comments and @mentions with granular per-project and per-type rules across in-app, email and push — so the pings you get are the ones you'd want. See how it fits with the rest of your workflow on pricing, and start free to give your team a badge worth trusting again.
