Stress Awareness Day: fewer pings, more focus

2026-11-04 · The Scrums team

Today is Stress Awareness Day, in the middle of International Stress Awareness Week. One everyday source of pressure at work is easy to reduce: the constant pull of notifications. Here's how to set a team's tools up to interrupt less.

Today is Stress Awareness Day, held on the first Wednesday of November in the middle of International Stress Awareness Week, a campaign run by the International Stress Management Association.

Workplace stress has many causes, and most of them need more than a setting to fix. But one everyday source of pressure is surprisingly easy to reduce: the steady stream of pings, badges and pop-ups that pulls people away from focused work and makes every message feel urgent.

Habits that help a team

Agree what's urgent. Most messages can wait an hour. Write down, as a team, what can't, and how to reach someone when it really is urgent.
Use threads. A reply in a thread notifies the people in that conversation, not the whole channel.
Save @channel for things everyone must see now.
Say when you're away. A status that says "Focus time until 2 pm" saves everyone a "did you see my message?".
Let email wait. An email about a message you've already read is noise.

How Scrums keeps the noise down

Statuses. Set an emoji and a few words, such as "Focus time" or "On holiday", until a time you choose. They show beside your name everywhere, and you can show as away whatever you're doing.
Pause notifications. Pause them until a time you pick: nothing pops up, no email goes out, and people writing to you see that you've paused them.
Emails only when they help. An email about an unread direct message or mention goes out only if you're not in the app, and only after it has waited as long as you chose: 15 minutes, an hour, four hours, or never. Each message is in one email at most.
Mute what you don't need. Muted conversations never notify you or send an email.
Desktop notifications on your terms. Choose on each device whether they show at all, and whether they include the message's words.

None of this replaces a manageable workload or a good manager. But a team that interrupts itself less has more attention left for the work, and for each other.