Send one daily summary containing everything that is useful to know but not actionable within the hour: revenue against target, orders processed, refund rate, stock movements below the alert threshold. Demoting these is what protects the attention that real alerts depend on, which is a finite budget rather than an infinite one.
Why this one is worth an interruption
Every alert you add reduces the value of every other alert. That is the constraint people ignore when they set these up, and it is why stores end up with a channel everyone mutes.
The digest is the pressure valve. It lets you say yes to wanting to know something without saying yes to being interrupted about it, and most requests for a new alert are satisfied by that.
The threshold
Timing matters more than content. Send it when somebody can act on what it says.
| Condition | Set it to | Why that number |
|---|---|---|
| Send at | start of the working day | Read before the day fills up |
| Not | end of day | It arrives when nobody can act and gets skipped |
| Length | one screen | Longer than that and only the first item is read |
| Content | yesterday plus anything ageing | The ageing part is what makes it useful |
| Weekend | skip or merge into Monday | A digest nobody reads teaches people to skip it |
Who should receive it
Everybody, which is only true because nothing in it demands action.
- The whole team, since it costs no interruption.
- Nothing in it requires an action, which is what makes broad distribution acceptable.
- Anything that does require action has been set up as an alert instead, and should not also appear here.
What to do when it fires
- Read it once, at the start of the day.
- Move anything that turns out to need action into an alert with a threshold, rather than reading the digest more carefully.
- Review the contents monthly and remove whatever nobody has referred to.
- If people stop reading it, shorten it rather than resending it.
When not to set this alert
If your digest is a screen and a half long, it has become a report and nobody is reading past the first item. Cut it rather than persisting.
If nothing in it has ever prompted a conversation, it is decoration. Stop sending it and see whether anybody asks.
Common questions
What belongs in a daily summary instead of an alert?
Anything useful to know but not actionable within the hour: revenue against target, orders processed, refund rate creeping up, stock movements below the alert threshold.
When should the daily summary be sent?
At the start of the working day, so it is read before the day fills up. End-of-day digests arrive when nobody can act on them and are reliably skipped.
Does a digest reduce how many alerts I need?
That is the point of it. Most requests for a new alert are satisfied by knowing the thing daily, and every alert you avoid adding protects the ones you kept.