In a medium-size team like Cookpad that maintains several active projects on GitHub, it can be a little overwhelming trying to keep up with all the activity and knowing what to pay attention to.

This post outlines one strategy that has worked out fairly well for us.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, as it basically makes use of built-in features in GitHub, but after having spoken to several people who are struggling with controlling the noise, seemed like it would be worth doing a write-up, so here goes:

1. Turn off email notifications

First off don’t let GitHub flood you with emails! 🌊

You’re more likely to filter them all out than get any kind of useful info (at least that’s what I used to do).

Instead, make sure “web” is ticked so you can leverage the excellent GitHub inbox:

2. Limit your attention

GitHub uses the concept of “Watching” to control what notifications you receive.

The default is to automatically watch every repository given access to. When joining a team that manages multiple repositories that amounts to quite a bit!

It is therefore recommended to uncheck this feature, so you by yourself can actively make the decision of whether to watch or not on a per-repository basis.

You can now go through each repository (GitHub has a helpful screen for this) and opt to watch, not watch, or completely ignore:

For the most part “not watching” is a good setting!

This will ensure you get notified of mentions, review requests, and any other activity on issues you are participating in.

Note that it can still be useful to pick a few main projects you regularly work on and set them to “watching”, as this will allow you to get an idea of what’s going on outside of the things you’re directly involved with.

3. Get to Inbox Zero

Use https://github.com/notifications as a GitHub to-do list, and allocate a bit of time each day to get to inbox zero.

Your focus should be on the participating tab. Try to get the unread count of this to “0” every day:

For the remaining unread notifications, it should be fine to check occasionally, maybe only dip into anything that catches your attention and otherwise mark as read.

4. Take immediate action

Doing something immediately is key to getting to inbox zero. Go through each item in a roughly prioritized manner:

• Old: Anything that says “x days ago” will get priority.
• Closed/Merged: Take a quick look if you haven’t already, otherwise mark as read.
• [WIP]: If the title says [WIP], mark as read .

As soon as you’ve clicked a notification, take action right away! 🐗

Meaning, either:

• Write a review / respond.
• If it looks like it might take a bit more work, prioritize it in your main work to-do list (I personally recommend teuxdeux) with a link to the PR.
• If someone is already reviewing and you have nothing to contribute, move on to the next.

From there you can resume any other scheduled tasks, including any reviews you felt needed deeper involvement, such as larger code suggestions/pairing etc.