Use Slack as your professional diary

While we all know Slack as the ubiquitous internal messaging application used in almost every startup and some large enterprise I’ve recently started using Slack for something completely different from its intended purpose.

I’ve always been struggling organising my own notes with both pen&paper and using some purpose built applications (from simple Mac/iOS Notes app to more sophisticated like Evernote and similar): becoming a CTO of a small startup just made this challenge even more important.

I often have some ideas or I need to take notes while on the go pen&paper is not always the most convenient option and at the same time I would like to avoid having another application to use because less is more. Additionally, most of the apps out there are not much more than some text documents with some metadata while I was looking for something different.

In my mind I started creating a list of some requirements of a potentially new app to build just for myself for the purpose of keeping track of my notes:

1. collect short messages around some open topics I’ve been dealing with as well pictures, documents and other files
2. timestamp each entry and sort them chronologically, plus group them by topic so that you can see a timeline for each one of them
3. have as many topics as I want with no restriction
4. search through the entries I’ve posted
5. available both on desktop and mobile

The more I was thinking about these requirements the more I was sure there was something I could use without building from scratch. At first I thought about using Twitter as I know some people are using it as private account without following anyone for the sake of writing down personal notes to keep private but this comes with all the limitations with Twitter (characters limits, no “folders” but just tags etc.) which could be just fine for personal use.

Then I realised that I’m already using something daily that ticks all of those requirements: Slack!

1. you simply create as many channels as you want, one for each “topic” you want to take notes (e.g. a specific project, long-time discussions, people you work with etc) and you post to that channel every time you want to record something
2. when posting to a channel Slack automatically adds a timestamp to that message
3. (as far as I know( Slack doesn’t limit the number of channels you can create
4. it provides a pretty good search experience through your workspace
5. I have already the Slack app installed on both my phone and computer, and I use it frequently during the day

I’m also using Slack for a less common purpose already (I have a workspace with my wife so that we can communicate and organise our day to day life) so the next thing I did was creating my own Slack workspace where I invited no one but me and started adding some channels and writing down some notes: as of writing, I have 18 open channels including the same one I opened to write down some ideas for this post. As expected I’m taking more notes and I manage to stay on top of all the topics I’m involved with. Additionally Slack comes with some additional features that can help a lot with productivity like reminders or the integration of other products API into a workspace.

You can start with a free account and then upgrade for a monthly fee (which is still slightly cheaper than Evernote, for example) only in case you post more than 10,000 messages, after which the search functionality becomes less effective because you can search through your most 10,000 messages only.

The only drawback? Slack keeps reminding you to invite other people (“Bring your team into Slack”) with banners on top of every channel and unfortunately this is something I haven’t managed to hide yet without creating another account (for yourself!) just to keep Slack quiet.