Quiet Hours in Slack and Teams: Stop After-Hours Notifications
A notification at 9pm is rarely about something that needs you at 9pm. Both Slack and Microsoft Teams can go quiet on a schedule, so evenings and weekends stay yours without uninstalling anything or going rogue. This guide covers how quiet hours work in each tool, according to their help pages, plus the gaps worth knowing about before you rely on them.
Miles Crawford
Slack: pause notifications on a schedule
Slack's version of quiet hours is the notification schedule. Once it is set, you only receive notifications on the days and during the hours you choose, and notifications are paused outside them. On desktop, click your profile picture in the sidebar, select Preferences, and below Working hours pick Every day, Weekdays or Custom from the Allow notifications menu, then set your start and end times. On mobile, tap your profile picture, tap Notifications and find the same options under Notification schedule. If your workspace has a default schedule set by an admin, your own schedule overrides it.
For one-off quiet, click your profile picture, hover over Notifications and pick a time frame, or use a slash command: /dnd for 15 mins, /dnd until 5pm or /dnd until tomorrow morning, with /dnd off to resume.
What people see when your Slack is paused
While your notifications are paused, a snooze icon appears next to your name, so colleagues can tell you are not reading. Slack also gives them a safety valve: when sending you a direct message, they can choose to notify you about an urgent message once per day. On your side, you can add specific people to a VIP list so their notifications come through even while everything else is paused. Between the two, a real emergency has a way in, and everything else waits for morning.
Teams: quiet time on mobile
Teams calls this quiet time, and the setting lives in the mobile app. Tap your profile picture, select Notifications, and under Block notifications choose Block during quiet hours. You can mute notifications during certain hours of the day, all day on selected days of the week, or both. Turning on Set on Teams and Outlook syncs the schedule across every Teams and Outlook mobile app signed into the same Microsoft account, and shares it with Viva Insights.
Two things make Teams' version gentler than it sounds. Other people cannot tell your notifications are muted, so nothing about your availability changes for them. And quiet time only silences sound and push notifications: when you open the app, your new messages and activity are still there.
Make quiet hours stick
Settings alone do half the job; the other half is expectations. A short status message telling people when you are back, or a quick word about how your team handles genuinely urgent pings, keeps quiet hours from turning into missed messages. If certain channels are the main source of evening noise, muting those channels works around the clock, and our focus time guide covers the daytime version of the same idea.
What to be careful about
- Quiet time in Teams is a mobile setting. Microsoft's article describes it for mobile devices, and your desktop notifications are a separate matter.
- The Teams sync switch is one-way. Microsoft notes that syncing your quiet time schedule to your devices and Outlook cannot be reversed, so set your hours before turning it on.
- Quiet hours follow your device's clock. In Teams, the schedule is based on device time and adjusts when you travel across time zones.
- Urgent Slack DMs can still reach you. Colleagues can override a pause once per day for something urgent. That is a feature, but it works best when the team agrees on what counts as urgent.
Sources
Checked October 17, 2026. The steps and behaviors follow each product's own help articles. The advice on norms and expectations is ours.