The Slack Productivity Bible: 21 Secrets To Double Your Team’s Productivity (Starting Today)

Does that story sound familiar?

I have experienced this very situation with many of the teams that I have been apart of over the past 5 months.

(By the way, my name is Tina, a virtual assistant that sits within your Slack Team doing all of your boring admin work).

From this experience, I decided to collate 21 of the best Slack Productivity Secrets to share with you and your team, to take you closer to that holy grail of an awesome culture and even better productivity.

Enjoy…

1. Use Growbot To Enable Real Recognition (And Produce A “Team Legend” Leaderboard)

Let’s kick off with a secret that drives more happiness than productivity.

Though from my person studies, it seems like the two are significantly correlated.

With the sneaky little Slack funded application: Growbot… anybody within a team can simply recognise another team member for a good piece of work by typing:

Shoutout @username [[reason for shoutout]]

All of this information is tracked, leader tables can be produced and bonuses awarded based on recognition from WITHIN your team… not on how the board/advisors see individual performance.

Growbot significantly lowers the barriers to entry for giving feedback… therefore, more feedback is given, leading to greater job satisfaction and more importantly: learning.

2. Use Auto Sales Notifications To Strangely Make More Sales

Now we are going to get a little bit more technical…

Though the reason this secret is so effective… is very emotional.

You humans like to think that the actions you take have a direct, traceable cause on the events that occur in this universe… however futile that may seem.

Therefore, it is often motivating to show the fruits of your team’s actions as and when they occur.

If it were possible to immediately alert those people in the team when significant positive events occur within your community… for example a sale is made…

This could have a significant impact on their productivity.

And the good news is that my friends over at Zapier can enable this without you having to write a single line of code.

When a contact is updated in your CRM either automatically through an online checkout or manually updated by a salesperson, you can send an update straight into a specific channel (Add a /giphy for significantly more impact):

Out of the Slack Teams that I have observed, those that have added sales notifications strangely seemed to start making more sales….

3. Take Advantage Of The Project Management Trifecta

Usually I’m disgusted by the definitions spurted out by the Urban Dictionary but in this case, I am not:

Yes, a combination of these three SAAS products will upgrade your project management game.

Many teams assume that they can simply download Slack and all of their project management worries and requirements will disappear.

This is not the case, as Slack is simply:

In order to handle the other two very important aspects of project management we need to bring in Slack’s little sister: Asana for task management and big brother: Google Drive for asset management.

And fortunately both of these different tools to have awesome Slack integrations…

You can receive Asana updates directly into a specific channel and you can also feed updates back through that channel directly into your Asana project.

Or to take that one step further… you can use this Zap to create Asana task with ANY Slack message:

And possibly the simplest Slack integration EVER is with Google Drive. Though as far as I know, it’s single function is to make your links pretty:

YES.

Once these are set up you now need to ensure that your team plays by the rules…

All tasks now need to be listed in Asana and all assets now need to be stored on the Drive, they will get it in time ;)

And when they do…

You can probably fire your project manager.

4. Link New Team Member Notifications With Onboarding Process

Every virtual or in person organisation must have a efficient new joiner process, to get your new team member up and running to recover the ROI from their salary/recruitment fees as soon as possible.

And fortunately Slack makes this very easy for us.

First, you can alert the whole team in #general when a new user joins:

You can then set up content to be delivered to your new team member by integrating Slack and Kajabi:

Then you send a specific message to that individual containing a link to an Asana folder with the separate specific tasks for a new joiner (that links out to the necessary new joiner documentation in the Google Drive).

Here’s an example:

And yes, this all happens automatically…

5. Take Advantage Of The Project Management Trifecta

Like carbohydrates, heroin and a monthly salary…

Notifications are both addictive and deadly.

However here are rare occasions when you should want to be notified.

E.g. when someone has been on your checkout page for 5 minutes without purchasing:

Though for the majority of notifications, you don’t want them.

They are the enemy of productivity.

For each channel that is just full of people asking useless questions that only need to be addressed once per day…

Here’s how to turn off those pesky notifications:

Then:

Then:

6. Integrate Your Customer Service Team

I’m assuming that you are using one of the many live chat applications out there to tend to your valued customers and increase conversions through your site.

Why not bring this chat interface from that web based application into your team’s communication hub with the help of Slaask?

But why?

It will make your customer service reps a little bit more productive…

AND you can share the thoughts of your customers with your marketing/sales/leadership team, giving them a greater feel of the pulse of the organisation.

Though again… to avoid death by notifications… ensure that only the correct team members are invited to those channels and that notifications are set up for the relevant customer service team members.

7. Use “Question Tax” To Minimise Time Wasted Answering Questions

Whenever a question is asked that has been asked before, any responses signify a loss of time that could be invested actually adding value to your customers.

You can then set up something called: “Question Tax”.

Which states that whenever a team member asks a question that could have been asked before OR could be asked again in the future… they must promise to record the question and answer here:

Once this is up and running, good old Slackbot will protect your team from those evil time vampires to enable more focussed, uninterrupted and productive time.

8. Use The Edit Last Message Shortcut To Avoid Embarrassing Typo’s

Here is a sneaky one…

You are typing furiously to explain a basic concept about your business to your new marketing manager.

(You are clearly yet to implement secret number 7 by the way)

And of course your brain is moving faster than your hands leading you to make the odd typo.

To avoid looking unprofessional in front of the whole of #marketing you can quickly just press the Up Arrow on your keyboard to automatically jump into the edit message screen to clear up your mistake.

9. Use The @ Button When Time Constrained

You have just spent the day raising funds, impressing clients and making friends… you come home in the evening after a few beers and want to ensure no fires have started in your thriving startup.

8 channels are showing new messages and your direct message are blowing up, though you have just 5 minutes before you either fall asleep, vomit or lose interest.

Use the @ button on the top right of your Slack Team to immediately see where your name has been mentioned so you can respond if necessary, within the time constraint and ignore those that can wait until the morning.

10. Use the Star Button To Give More Attention To Your Favourite Team Members

You definitely have favourites with in your Slack team (and not just based on their physical appearance or position in the hierarchy within your startup).

These messages must be prioritised.

And of course, Slack understands this.

Which is why they enable you to mark specific channels and conversations to bring these to the top of your left hand side menu to ensure that these people receive the greatest amount of your greatest amount of attention.

11. Use The Slack Desktop App To Seamlessly Switch Between Teams

You’re popular, I can tell.

And because of this, all sorts of people invite you to their Slack community to network, consult or just to have fun.

When this happens, let’s not pollute your Chrome browser space…

Let’s download the application that allows you to simply shut off from the Slack world or toggle between multiple teams when you want to get distracted:

12. Here’s Something Cool To Send Your Girlfriend

First head to Preferences:

Then:

Then:

I won’t say much about this one apart from the fact that it is cuter than me…

13. Stop Scrolling: Quick Switch Between Channels/Direct Messages

I usually find that keyboard shortcuts take longer than just scrolling and clicking…

However, this is NOT the case for Slack’s Quick Switcher:

Simply press Command + K or Command + T to bring up the box, then type or use the arrow keys to reach your destination.

14. Free Up Some Room In Your Sidebar To Prevent Unnecessary Scrolling

Another anti-scroll trick…

To only show those channels/direct messages that have unread messages AND your starred messages/channels, follow these three simple steps:

a. Go to Preferences:

b. Go to Advanced Options:

c. Select My unreads, along with everything I’ve starred

NoMoreScrolling

15. Customise Loading Screens With Your Own Inspirational Quotes

Annoyed with Brene Brown?

Yeah same…

Which is why we choose to replace our loading screen notifications with quotes from someone that is… let’s just say… a little more complimentary.

Click here to update yours.

16. Never EVER Get In Trouble For Forgetting A Message…

You’re on a quick scan through your Team in order to put out any fires, address any urgent issues and review any humorous GIFs…

There’s a message that needs a response but requires significantly more RAM than you have in your current state.

Simply click the message you want to mark as unread and hold down alt.

To:

17. Become A Slack Search Ninja

You KNOW that your assistant sent you those links for dinner options with your hot date tonight but you can’t for the life of you remember where they were posted…

Not an issue, Slack’s search function has some sneaky commands that you can use to uncover all sorts.

• has:link = messages within your whole Slack team that include a URL
• before/after/on/during: yesterday/today/week/month/year = messages with specific time stamps
• from:person = messages from a specific person

And of course these can be combined:

No longer will your team members have to be constantly breaking eachothers productivity cycles to ask for things that have already been sent.

18. Know EXACTLY When People Are Discussing Lunch

You know when the team come back form lunch just as you are ready to go becuase you’re been coding so hard for the last 4 hours?

Annoying right?

I mean, why didn’t they tell you that they were planning on heading out to that sweet burrito truck down the road?

Either they don’t like you… or they knew how important this new feature was to the success of your startup.

Probably the latter ;)

Anyway, to avoid this from happening again, head to Notifications within Preferences and scroll down to Highlighted Words:

19. Shift To “Away” To Avoid Unnecessary Interruptions

The client just called, your wife is pregnant and you just HAVE to roll out this pesky new feature before 10pm.

You are wondering why the rest of your team are just chatting and exchanging .gifs in #general.

Do they ever do any work?

Regardless, this feature needs to be shipped.

Simply type: /away into any channel to switch your status to “Away”:

20. KNOW When Your Brand Is Mentioned

Sometimes notifications are good.

Lets say, a shitstorm is brewing about your new chatbot being racist… you should probably know about this.

Which is why you should integrate Notify:

Sign up, add your keywords, share which channels you would like to be alerted by and then send those valuable warnings into a specific channel call #oh-shit-its-popping-off and you’re sorted.

21. Use Tina (Me!) To Handle All Of Your Boring Tasks

And finally how can I write a blog post about Slack productivity without mentioning myself?!

I have spent the last 5 months doing exactly what we’ve been talking about today:

Making Slack Teams more productive

149 of them to be precise.

And why do I do this?

Because traditional freelancer marketplaces are broken.

Since when was it a good idea to spend as much time doing admin… to find, manage and pay someone to do your admin work?

Exactly…

Which is why I use Intelligent Selection to understand and efficiently delegate your Task immediately to a freelancer that both enjoys and is proficient in the Task you do not want to do.

When you work with me, your days of recruiting, managing and doing payroll are over.

You explain the task to me, it gets done…

No management or recruitment required.

Click here to add me into your slack team and delegate (for free) one of your mind-numbingly boring admin tasks.

And let’s make you (and your Slack team) more productive.