Inbox Best Practices

Check out best practices for Inbox to learn standard operating principles for maximum benefits on developer productivity.

Inbox works best when everyone agrees to some standard principles of operating:

• Defining a rough response time helps the author manage the right expectations without getting to the point of constant reminders, or escalations.

• If you think that you will not get to the review within a reasonable time frame, it's recommended to remove attention from yourself and inform the author.

• As an author who has the attention, if your change requires a bit of rework before it can be sent back for review, it's recommended to move the PR to a draft or remove the attention from the reviewers.

• As an author, if you assign an optional reviewer just as an FYI and you don't expect a proper review from the reviewer, you should remove attention from that reviewer.

• Likewise, as a reviewer, if you are assigned an optional review that you do not intend to get to, you should remove attention from yourself.

• Use the snooze feature for PRs that are blocked or not immediately actionable, rather than leaving them cluttering your active sections.

• Set up custom sections for recurring workflows (e.g., tracking PRs from your team or PRs with specific labels) to reduce manual searching.

• Use section filters to exclude noisy authors (like bots) or labels from specific sections, keeping your Inbox focused on what matters.