More Signal, Less Noise. Dealing With GitHub Notifications.

Software projects are complicated. As soon as they involve more than two people, it becomes increasingly hard to stay updated on the important things, and to reduce the noise of conversations that are irrelevant to you. If you use GitHub to manage your project, this can be twice as hard. Using only GitHub has a large number of benefits, but its notification system doesn’t exactly win prizes.

I will show you some ways to increase the signal to noise ratio in your day to day usage of GitHub. Not every repository, not every issue deserves your full attention. On the other hand, if other people need information from you, you’ll never want to miss them reaching out. With the right configuration you can stay sane and get things done without losing your focus.

Unwatch irrelevant repositories

The most important setting. By default, GitHub subscribes you to every new repository in your organisation. That is not necessarily a bad thing (and can be turned off in your Notification Settings) as you’ll keep an overview of new projects. But I really recommend you to go through the list of repositories you’re watching and unwatch everything not super important to you. Five minutes very well spent. And of course, you’ll still be notified when someone @mentions you.

Unwatching repositories is half the battle.

Turn off email notifications

Here’s where you can really separate the signal from the noise. Turn off Email notifications for repositories you’re watching, but leave that setting on for conversations you’re participating in. Bonus: You can even reply directly to notification emails to post a reply in a conversation on GitHub. Bonus²: If you use Google Inbox, it will bundle all GitHub mail into a neat stack.

In your Notification Settings, turn off email notifications for conversations you’re not participating in.

Unsubscribe from conversations

Unsubscribe from conversations in issues and pull requests if they’re no longer relevant to you.

Once a conversation in an issue or pull request is no longer relevant to you, unsubscribe from it using the button in the sidebar. Pretty simple. If someone @mentions you again, you’ll be resubscribed, so you won’t miss anything important.

You can even unsubscribe from conversations on the Notification Page.

Shape your notification habits

Now that only the important stuff is landing in your inbox, the notification area on GitHub itself becomes a pretty neat secondary inbox. Opening and reading a notification email will magically mark the conversation as read on GitHub, so you really only get the mildly interesting updates on that page. I scan that page once or twice a day and make liberal use of the Mark all as read button.

Note that there are some useful filters in the sidebar on the notifications page. They let you view e.g. only notifications for specific repositories or conversations you’re participating in.

Check out those filters on the Notification Page!

Also starring: Feeding GitHub notifications into Slack

In our Golden Age of Integration, where most services can talk to each other in some way, it has become common to pipe GitHub activity into your Slack/HipChat/IRC. I am not a fan of that.

First of all, you’re turning an asynchronous medium into a synchronous one. The main benefit of being able to allocate time to read notifications in batches is nixed in favour of an always-scrolling firehose.

Inevitably, people will start commenting on issue notifications in the chatroom, fragmenting your communication and knowledge base. (Where did Jack leave that comment on my issue again?) Worse: People leaving that channel due to the noise might miss out on communication.

If your notifications are fed into a regular channel, noise is increased, making it harder to parse the normal communication in that channel.

Sounds great. How do I start?

If you see no way to start, declaring notification bankruptcy might be the only viable way. Default on your debt: Unwatch all repositories. Mark all notifications as read. Delete all GitHub email. Configure your GitHub account using the steps above, then start watching only the repositories that are important to you.

I hope these tips are of help – if you have feedback or a better way of dealing with GitHub notifications, get in touch!

A new contender: Octobox. Octobox acts as an inbox for your GitHub notifications. I have only briefly checked it out, but it looks promising.