Turn your Slack messages into actions

Slack, “the real-time messaging for modern teams”, is one of the very few enterprise apps that people love and truly enjoy using. It’s fun, it’s powerful, it make you more productive. We couldn’t help working together with them.

Kyber helps people getting things done together. At home or at work, “productivity interactions” are incredibly common:

“Can you do it for me?”

“Do you want to do it together?”

We call it “social productivity”, a new category of apps aimed to simplify and enhance human interactions.

Such interactions don’t start on productivity apps, they start on messaging. But because of the unstructured nature of messaging, they are difficult to track. For these reasons, we decided, as Slack did, to build Kyber “social productivity” experience around messaging and, as Slack, we believed that integrations (and automation) can make conversations remarkably efficient and productive.

Therefore, it became natural for us to build a Kyber integration to turn Slack messages into actions, adding in the most seamless way our productivity layer on top of Slack messaging.

Kyber 💍 to Slack and she said yes.

How does it work

Kyber integrates messaging with to-dos, reminders, calendars, maps, Uber and even more via IFTTT. By doing so, it enhances two main kind of common interactions:

• requests to do something for you — send roadmap presentation, push to production a release, bring ping pong racket
• invites to do something with you — join roadmap meeting, celebrate release, play ping pong

With Kyber on Slack, requests become assigned tasks, tracked by both sender and receiver until completion; invites become shared tasks added to your daily plan and automatically sync’ed with your calendars when applicable. Important messages are tracked, “Have you done that?” rate of messages go down, things get happily done. Through very simple, highly flexible, natural messages.

👤 Assign a task

When asking someone to do something for you, simply use the tell command and type a normal message:

/tell @mike to send roadmap presentation at 3 PM

Once you enter this simple message a lot of magic happens:

• “Send roadmap presentation” is added to Mike’s to-do list, organized by day
• The same task is added to your “assigned” list, so you can easily track open action items and follow up if needed
• Mike can type /show and find the task along with its to-dos and meetings of the day
• At 3 PM he will receive a reminder to send that presentation
• When Mike types /complete send roadmap presentation, the task is marked done and you are automatically notified

The assigned task can be a simple to-do, a reminder with time or an event (that will also be sync’ed with recipient’s calendar).

👥 Do it together (meetings anyone?)

When you need to organize a meeting or simply share a to-do or reminder to be done together, you can use the ask command.

If the task is for a specific set of people, one or more, simply list them after the ask command and write your message:

/ask @mike to review roadmap presentation from 5 to 6 PM in Da Vinci conference room

If you want to invite everyone in a channel, let’s say the engineering team, just go to the #engineering channel and enter a similar message:

/ask #engineering to review roadmap presentation from 5 to 6 PM in Da Vinci conference room

That simple message automatically triggers the following actions:

• the message is turned into a task listed in your daily plan, again visible through the /show command
• in case of an event like here, everyone’s calendar, including yours, are updated
• invitees can accept or decline the invitation or even propose a new time and you will be notified about it
• at 5 PM (or little earlier depending on your settings) every invitee is automatically reminded to join the meeting
• at 6 PM when the meeting is over, the task is removed from your daily plan and moved into the completed section

In this case, a to-do, a reminder or an event, is “shared” with all the participants, including you.

📩 Not on Kyber yet? No problem

Kyber integration works great also for people in your team NOT on Kyber yet. Simply send your message to their email address (/ask stewart@myboss.com to get a coffee) and they will be able to mark the task done, accept or reject the invitation, from the email they received. A Slack notification about their answer will be sent to you to keep you informed.

🚀 Boost your personal productivity

Of course Kyber is also a very handy personal productivity tool, as you imagined. Kyber is the only app that combines to-dos, reminders and calendars in a single view, so you can always know what to do next.

The core idea behind combining everything together is to make sure you build a short, but actionable, plan for the day. For the rest, use the Someday section to track anything you don’t want to forget, but don’t plan to do right away. It’s a simple method that will make your day at work so much more focused and productive.

Get Kyber and try the integration on Slack today.