He Built a Custom Dashboard to Triage Slack Notifications by Priority

Yash Tekriwal got tired of scrolling through a wall of Slack notifications and decided to build actual software on top of it. His custom dashboard sorts every ping into three priority columns so he can focus on what matters and bulk-dismiss what does not.

The Problem: Slack Notifications Are a Firehose

Every Slack power user knows the feeling. You open the app after a meeting and find dozens of unread messages spread across DMs, group mentions, threads, and channels. There is no built-in way to tell which ones need a response right now and which ones are just someone sharing a meme in #random. The default Slack notification panel treats everything with equal weight, which means you become the sorting algorithm.

The Three-Column Triage System

Yash's dashboard called "Digest" breaks notifications into three color-coded columns:

• Red (Action Required) on the left. These are urgent items where someone is waiting on a response. They sit front and center so nothing falls through the cracks.
• Yellow (Need to Read) in the middle. These are messages worth understanding for context, but they probably do not require a reply.
• Green (FYI) on the right. Low-priority updates, team celebrations, and informational posts that you can skim or skip entirely.

The visual layout shown in the video is clean and dark-themed, with each column clearly labeled and populated with real Slack messages pulled from channels like #team-education-main, #team-gtm-events, and #workstream-brand.

Filtering and Sorting Controls

Beyond the three columns, the dashboard includes a sidebar with filter categories for slicing notifications by type. You can choose to work through DMs first, or start with group mentions, or focus on threads. There are also filter pills at the top of the interface for Direct @Mentions, DMs, Group Mentions, and Threads, along with a date selector. This means you can customize your order of operations based on how you prefer to process information each morning.

The Archive All Button

The feature Yash highlights as his favorite is the "Archive All" button on the FYI column. One click removes every green notification from the dashboard, and those notifications also get marked as read inside Slack itself. No more manually clicking through dozens of low-priority messages just to clear your unread count. As Yash puts it in the video: "That's magic."

Key Takeaways

• Slack's default notification view treats everything equally, which forces you to manually triage every message. A priority-based layer on top solves this.
• Three tiers (action required, need to read, FYI) cover most notification types and give you a clear starting point for your workday.
• Bulk actions like "Archive All" save real time by letting you dismiss entire categories of low-priority messages in one click, with changes syncing back to Slack.
• Custom filtering by message type (DMs, mentions, threads) lets you control the order you process notifications, which reduces context switching.

Resources

• Slack API documentation for building custom integrations
• How I AI on TikTok for more AI and productivity tool breakdowns
• Slack notification management tips from Slack's official help center