Life of a leader of a software development team includes a lot of meetings - planning work, helping out teammates, reviewing their work, interviewing people, and lots more. Ever since I became one, I had to start to attend those meetings.
Unfortunately for me, during work hours I also receive a lot of notifications, which often compete for my attention. I tried ignoring them, but it doesnât work for me. Whenever a notification pops up on my screen, I immediately switch focus to it.
Previously it was only irritating, but in the last couple of weeks I have started attending a lot of interviews, sometimes even one every week day. And during these I donât want to ask the interviewee to repeat something they have just said because I got distracted by a notification. Having some free time, I decided to solve this issue once and for all (hopefully).
Since Iâm solving this issue for my specific use-case, there will be two assumptions that I will make:
- If I have a tab with a meeting open, it will always be focused, because:
- I use Chromium for meets, since Firefox doesnât let me share my screen exactly how I want to do it, and I donât use Chromium for anything else.
- I will control my notifications using
dunstctl
The whole thing turned out to be rather simple - the only software
that I use for my meetings in my work is Googleâs Meet (unfortunately),
and I noticed that whenever a meet tab was open, the window name had a
specific format; first there was Meet -, then the meeting
code or number and then - Chromium. The code is in format
xxx-xxxx-xxx where each x stands for a random
letter, and the name format is just whatever it was set up by the person
organizing the event. When no meet is active and the tab is opened on
the dashboard of meetings, the windowâs name is just
Meet.
After some work, I prepared a quick script that detects an opened meeting and disables the notification. It ainât the prettiest, but it gets the job done. To have it automated, I just added it to cron to run every minute. The delay between joining a calendar event and the notifications being stopped doesnât hurt me.