Keep Your Chats and Channels Simple

As regular users of chats and channels, it’s important to quickly get to what matters, and stay organized while we do so. Here’s how we stay up to date in our teams and never miss important messages.

Triage Incoming Messages

We’re always getting new messages. Without a system for organizing them, it can quickly become overwhelming. We rely on these three features to ensure we don’t miss something critical.

Check for @Mentions

The @Mention view lets us prioritize messages that need immediate attention. Select @Mentions to see the full message and respond without losing your place.

View Unread Messages

By filtering conversations to display only unread messages, we can easily catch up on the latest updates without feeling overwhelmed.

Keep Your Digital Workspace Tidy

A messy workspace hinders productivity. This is true for Teams as well. We keep everything organized by using these best practices:

Group conversations into sections

We like to group our 1:1, group chats, and channels by projects or topics to make it easy to find them later. Most of us like to create 3-5 sections based on key projects that we’re working on.

Remove stale conversations

Once a chat or channel has served its purpose, and there’s no new activity, we hide or remove the chat history. This keeps our workspace from becoming cluttered.

Find what you need fast

Shortcuts help us navigate through conversations quickly. Some of our favorite shortcuts include:

Go-To Search Bar

Find any chat or channel conversation with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G (Cmd+G on Mac).

Compose a New Message

Start any message with Ctrl+N on Windows or CMD+N on Mac.

Access Your Channels Quickly

When you have a lot of channels, it can be hard to notice when there’s activity in one. In combined mode, the Teams and channels quick navigation bar notifies you when any channel has new activity and takes you to it.

Be Productive on-the-Go

When we're not at our desk, we use Teams on our phones to stay connected. Message previews help us manage conversations on smaller screens, while custom mobile notifications let us create different rules for which conversations matter while we’re away.