[teampractices] Fwd: Handling Phabricator notifications

[Quim Gil]

Forwarding here for those of you not following wikitech-l, since bad
management of Phabricator notifications can affect the effectiveness of
team collaboration.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Quim Gil <qgil at wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 10:32 AM
Subject: Handling Phabricator notifications
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


Hi, it seems that there is many people struggling with following
Phabricator notifications. Being overwhelmed by notifications defeats the
purpose of notifications. :)

This is an invitation to share some thoughts.

The main trick is of course to pay attention to what you
subscribe/unsubscribe to. Sometimes I ask myself: why am I receiving this
notification, and after a quick investigation it turns out that I am still
watching some project that I am not really interested anymore, or at least
not at the extent that it would impede me to follow better the projects
that I really want to follow.

I actually unsubscribe from many tasks, and that keeps the signal high vs
noise ratio high.

Email preferences can also help a lot reducing the amount of (what for you
constitutes) noise. Also, many people seem to struggle with volume of
emails received and haven't really tried the alternative of web
notifications, which (at least for me) allow for quicker scanning + the
fabulous button "Mark all as read".

I also set many types of notifications to "ignore", because for me at least
the information they bring doesn't compensate for the noise they create. I
have copied my Maniphest email preferences at https://www.mediawiki.org/
wiki/User:Qgil-WMF/Sandbox just in case someone finds them useful.

-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil



-- 
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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