Notifications and Inbox
The point of notifications is not to tell you everything. It is to tell you the things you would have been annoyed to miss.
The two personal surfaces
Section titled “The two personal surfaces”| Surface | Answers | Shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox | What changed that involves me? | G I |
| My Work | What is assigned to me, everywhere? | G W |
Inbox is a feed you clear. My Work is a list you work from. Most people check Inbox once in the morning and live in My Work the rest of the day.
What creates a notification
Section titled “What creates a notification”You hear about something when:
- a task is assigned to you
- someone mentions you — in a description, a comment, a chat message, or a wiki page
- someone replies to your comment
- someone comments on a task you are involved in
- something changes on work you follow
Mentioning a team or @everyone notifies each person in it individually, so
nobody has to be watching a channel at the right moment.
Realtime email is on by default for the types above, and each type has its own switch. Turn off “assigned to me” emails and the batch version — “you were assigned 12 tasks” — goes quiet with it. One decision, not two.
Every email links straight to the thing that happened, and every email can be unsubscribed from at the bottom.
The daily digest
Section titled “The daily digest”Instead of a message per event, get one summary.
| Setting | You get |
|---|---|
| Daily | One digest per day. The default. |
| Weekly | One digest per week. |
| Off | Nothing — realtime email only. |
The digest covers what happened since the last one, so switching from daily to weekly does not lose anything in between.
Quiet hours
Section titled “Quiet hours”Set a start and an end time and dotby holds notifications inside that window. It is your local wall clock, not a server’s, so 22:00–07:00 means your evening.
Personal Slack delivery is opt-in, and deliberately narrow — three things only:
- a task assigned to you
- a mention of you
- a status change
It arrives as a direct message, not as a channel firehose. Slack is for the handful of events worth interrupting you; Inbox is for everything else.
Push on mobile
Section titled “Push on mobile”The mobile app delivers the same events as push notifications. Signing in on your phone is all the setup there is. See dotby on mobile.
The “New” line in a comment thread
Section titled “The “New” line in a comment thread”Come back to a busy task and a New line marks where you stopped reading. Read the three comments you missed instead of re-reading forty.
The line is drawn from when you last opened the task, so it survives you closing the tab and coming back tomorrow.
Turning the volume down properly
Section titled “Turning the volume down properly”If dotby is noisy, the fix is usually not to disable notifications. It is one of these:
- Stop following what you do not care about. Involvement is the main source of volume.
- Switch to the daily digest for comment activity and keep realtime email for assignments and mentions only.
- Use quiet hours rather than turning a whole type off, if the problem is when rather than what.
- Team chat — the other place conversation happens.
- Write anything — how mentions work.
- dotby on mobile — push notifications.