A vacation mode for Slack
• 2 min read
It’s 2018 and there’s still no easy way to turn off Slack notifications while you’re on vacation. The workarounds aren’t adequate, and it’s been three years since Slack said a vacation mode was in the works.
Workarounds
We use Slack at work, and most people I know end up doing one of three things:
- Uninstalling the Slack mobile app
- Signing out of the workspace in the mobile app
- Turning off push notifications for the app
There’s a fourth, more advanced workaround that involves hacking do not disturb. Do not disturb only goes up to 24 hours, and most vacations are longer than that, so the hack is to set your do-not-disturb schedule to run from 1:30am to 1:00am every day.
All of these have downsides. They all require doing something you have to remember to undo later, and apart from the do-not-disturb hack that nobody uses, they turn the Slack app off completely.
That’s a problem in both directions. If a coworker is on vacation and I need to reach her about something important, I have no way to do it. If I’m the one on vacation, it isn’t better for me either. I’m probably more stressed, because I don’t know whether people are trying to reach me, so I check in every so often and never fully tune out.
Why it matters
Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s CEO, has said the mission is “to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive.” Not having a vacation mode works against that. A proper one would make time off simpler, let people enjoy it, and bring them back more productive. It’s a way of respecting people’s lives outside work.
My worry is that the feature has sunk deep into the backlog. With the recent $400M raise, there’s more pressure to grow and ship flashier features, and boring, user-requested ones like this can take a backseat.
To be fair, Slack keeps improving. Statuses and do not disturb were a good start, and threads recently got image support. I’d like to see this one followed through on too.
Update, September 2026
Four months after I wrote this, Slack shipped the pieces: a status you can set to expire, and a pause on notifications until a date and time you pick. Today it’s one step. You set a status, pick when it clears, and check a box to pause notifications until then. I use it whenever I’m away. I set it up before I go, so I don’t have to remember to turn it on, and it’s good UX.
Looking back, it’s better than what I asked for, which was basically an off switch. Slack’s version ends on its own, so there’s nothing to undo when you get back, and your coworkers can see your status, so they know why you’re quiet. If something is urgent, they can still notify you anyway once a day, and anyone on your VIP list gets through. None of the workarounds above did any of that.