Zahidul Islam

Founder, Safe Screen Share

Jun 13, 2026

6 min read

How to Hide Notifications While Screen Sharing (Mac & Windows)

You're three minutes into a demo, sharing your screen, when a DM slides in from the corner: “did you ever pay that invoice?” Everyone on the call saw it. That's the exact moment this guide is about. To hide notifications while screen sharing, you turn on Do Not Disturb before the call starts, and you do it in the right place for your setup. This page covers Mac, Windows, the apps themselves, and your phone, plus the one thing Do Not Disturb can't fix.

The short version: silencing notifications takes about ten seconds once you know where the switch lives. The longer version is that notifications are only half of what leaks during a share. We'll get to the other half.

Hide notifications on macOS

macOS uses Focus modes, and Do Not Disturb is the simplest one. Turn it on from the menu bar:

• Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar (the two small toggles near the clock).
• Click Focus.
• Choose Do Not Disturb. Banners, alerts, and badge sounds stop until you switch it off.

If you present on a schedule, open System Settings > Focus and set Do Not Disturb to turn on automatically at your usual call times, or tie it to the apps you share from. That way you never have to remember. One caveat: the exact menu wording shifts slightly between macOS versions, but the Control Center route works on all recent ones.

Hide notifications on Windows

Windows 11 calls it Do Not Disturb. Windows 10 calls the same idea Focus Assist. Both live a couple of clicks away.

Windows 11: open Settings > System > Notifications and turn on Do Not Disturb. The fastest path is to click the date and time in the taskbar and toggle it from the notification panel.

Windows 10: open Settings > System > Focus Assist and set it to Alarms only. That silences everything except your own reminders. You can also right-click the Action Center icon in the taskbar to flip it quickly.

On either version, set a rule so Focus turns on when you're duplicating your display or running a presentation. Windows can detect those states and silence alerts on its own.

Silence notifications inside Zoom, Teams, and Meet

The call apps have their own switches, and they can override or back up the OS setting.

Zoom has a dedicated option to silence system notifications while you share. Turn on “Mute notifications when sharing the screen” in your Zoom settings and it handles Do Not Disturb for you the moment a share begins. For the full safe-sharing routine, see how to share your screen on Zoom safely.

Microsoft Teams doesn't silence the OS for you, so turn on Windows or macOS Do Not Disturb before you present, and set your Teams status to Do Not Disturb to quiet Teams' own chat pop-ups. More in how to screen share on Teams safely.

Google Meet runs in the browser, so the OS-level Do Not Disturb does most of the work, but browser tab notifications and extension alerts can still fire. Walkthrough here: how to screen share on Google Meet safely.

Don't forget your phone

Desktop notifications aren't the only source. If you use Phone Link on Windows or iPhone mirroring on a Mac, your texts and app alerts show up on the same screen you're sharing. Do Not Disturb on the computer doesn't always reach those.

Before a call, switch your phone to Do Not Disturb too, or pause the mirroring connection. A single text from a family member is enough to derail a professional demo, and it lands in any recording.

What Do Not Disturb doesn't hide

Here's the part most guides skip. Do Not Disturb stops new pop-ups. It does nothing about what's already sitting on your screen.

The open Gmail tab still previews your latest messages in the sidebar. The Slack window still shows unread channel names and DM snippets. The dashboard still has a customer's email and a payout figure in plain view. Notifications are the alerts you get; the inbox, the sidebar, and the dashboard are the data you already have open. Silencing one doesn't touch the other.

So the full picture of a clean share is two jobs, not one:

• Stop new alerts with Do Not Disturb, covered above.
• Hide existing on-page data by closing it, sharing a single window, or blurring what has to stay open.

For the manual approach to that second job, we wrote a full guide on how to hide personal info while sharing your screen.

Hide what's already on screen, automatically

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Safe Screen Share, so I have a stake here. Here's the approach, and you can judge it.

You can close tabs and sign out by hand every time, but the things you need on screen during a live demo are often the sensitive ones. That's where blurring beats closing. Safe Screen Share is a browser extension that detects sensitive content on the page and blurs it for you, so the inbox preview and the dashboard figure are already hidden by the time you're presenting.

• SmartBlur auto-detects emails, phone numbers, credit cards, and keys (Stripe, AWS, GitHub, OpenAI, and more), plus whole inboxes and sidebars in apps like Gmail, Slack, and Notion.
• Meeting Mode turns blur on the moment a Zoom, Meet, or Teams call starts, and off when it ends.
• 100% on-device. Nothing is captured, uploaded, or stored. The blur runs locally in your browser.

It works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Arc, and Vivaldi, and it's a one-time purchase instead of another subscription. You can add it to your browser or check the pricing (Pro is $49, Unlimited is $59, both lifetime).

The bigger picture on why the connection being encrypted isn't the same as your screen being safe lives in is screen sharing safe. Do Not Disturb handles the pop-ups. This handles the rest.

Frequently asked questions