11 Ways to Save Time Using Twist
Speed up your daily workflow and spend more time doing your best work with these Twist tips
Originally published on the official Doist blog
If you’ve ever worked on a home improvement project, you know that having the right tool at your fingertips can save you a ton of time… and aggravation. Taking on projects in your digital workspace is no different. That’s why we’ve put together a list of 11 time-saving features that you may not be using in Twist yet. They only take a few minutes to learn and will pay you big dividends in saved time and stress.
Take a look below and find out which tips work best for you:
1. Forward your emails into Twist
If you constantly find yourself forwarding things to teammates, start saving time and hassle by forwarding emails into a Twist channel or thread instead. All attachments will get forwarded along too.
Once your email is in Twist, you can notify the right people and discuss next steps in an organized way. Best of all, your email will now be searchable so anyone can find it later. Important information won’t be siloed in people’s email inboxes.
You can even set up auto-forwarding from a team-wide email address like sales@yourcompany.com or info@yourcompany.com so all emails get sent directly to a dedicated channel in Twist.
Take this idea a step further by replacing 100% of your team’s internal emails with Twist for more organized teamwork.
2. Easily save thread links to reference later
This is one our team uses every day, multiple times a day. One of the biggest advantages of threads over email and group chat is that you can reference whole conversations — including important information and key decisions — by simply sharing the thread link. For example:
- If you’re putting together a design brief, include a link to a thread where the design team discussed the project and came to a decision.
- When putting together a company introduction for new employees, link to a few threads showing teamwork at its best. Seeing team culture in action speaks 100x louder than words.
- If a teammate asks you a question about a certain topic you know has already been discussed, simply share the thread link so they can quickly get themselves up-to-speed.
If you use Todoist, you can also add a thread as a task with just a click. You’ll be able to set a due date, reminder, and more to ensure you follow up on the thread without ever leaving Twist.
For some more insights on using Todoist and Twist together, check out this post on balancing your team’s talk with action using Twist and Todoist.
3. Navigate faster with keyboard shortcuts
Save time when navigating around Twist for Web or Twist for Mac by using keyboard shortcuts.
- Quickly navigate around Twist by using Go to Threads, Go to Messages, Go to Search or Go to Inbox.
- Start a new thread from anywhere in Twist with Start a new thread.
- Keep up with important threads by using Star or unstar a thread.
- Save a mouse click with Post a thread, comment, or message.
4. Notify multiple people at the same time with Groups
The same types of messages and comments often involve the same groups of people. The design team needs to be notified about design discussions. The development team needs to be notified about bugs. Etc, etc.
Instead of manually adding each person every time, you can create a group and notify all the right people at once. Groups can be based on teams, projects, topics, or geography, just to name a few. They can consist of as many team members as you’d like, and each one has a unique name.
To notify a group, click on the notify field and start typing in the group name just like you would for an individual team member.
5. Reduce noise by notifying just the relevant people
Unlike email and group chat, Twist lets you choose who gets notified about a specific thread or comment. This ensures you aren’t over-notifying people who may not be relevant to your comment. Other team members can read your comment when they look at the thread, but your post won’t spam their Inbox.
There are a few ways to quickly reply to the right people:
- If you want everyone in the thread or channel to see your comment, notify everyone in the thread, or even everyone in the channel.
- When you’re having a conversation with a lot of team members but your comment is only relevant to a few people, select just those team members or groups you want to notify.
- In the web app, you can also choose to reply to all the people included in a previous comment. Just click the person icon in the top right of the comment and select Reply.
6. Create a video call in an instant
Twist is built for asynchronous communication, but sometimes you just need to hop on a call to hash things out. You can start a video call in seconds without ever leaving the Twist app via our Appear.in integration.
To install the integration, simply head to twistapp.com/integrations, find Appear.in, select it, and then click Install integration.
Now, you can type /appearin room-name in any message or thread and a link to the video chat room will appear. Anybody can click the link to join the video chat.
7. Automatically post team update threads
As your team grows, it’s important to have a process for transparent, regular updates without slowing everyone down. With Twist, you can automate your regular team updates with the Team Check-In integration.
Once installed, a new check-in thread will be posted every week or month (or whatever time period you want) with an introductory text that you write yourself. It makes it easy for everyone to know what everyone else is up to and helps hold the team accountable with minimal extra time required.
8. Keep track of all your app notifications in Twist
Save time and headaches by streaming notifications from your apps directly into Twist. You’ll be able to stay on top of all your updates in one place. With our Zapier integration, you can access over 250 apps with workflows like:
- Post a comment when any file in a Google Drive folder is updated.
- Start a thread every time there’s a new comment on your Wordpress blog.
- Start a thread from Twitter search mentions.
The possibilities are limitless, so find the workflows that fit into your day.
9. Schedule notification-free time every day
You don’t need to look too far to recognize that notification overload wreaks havoc on your well-being. Whether you’re trying to do deep work or simply disconnect after a long day, Twist makes it easy to customize your notifications settings to work on your schedule.
There are a few ways to handle notifications:
- Schedule daily snoozing times so you only receive updates while you’re at work.
- Snooze all notifications for a certain amount of time — anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours to get into a state of deep work.
- Going on vacation? Taking a sick day? Starting your parental leave? Set Time Off with specific start and end dates. During that time, you won’t receive any notifications. (As an added bonus, your avatar will automatically be updated so your teammates can see that you’re gone and when you’ll be returning.)
10. Quickly send messages and get useful information from teammates’ profiles
On the web, Android and iOS, you can quickly send a direct message to a teammate by clicking or tapping on that person’s photo and then clicking the Send message button (web) or message icon (Android/iOS). You’ll also be able to see your teammates’ job and their local time — a nice time-saver if you’re working with a big team or international colleagues.
11. Search faster with filters
As your Twist grows, search will help you find the conversations and information you need right when you need it. You can use search with filters to narrow down your search results by channel, author, date, and more.
Search even faster with these shortcuts:
- To search only in a specific channel, type in:ChannelName
- To search all comments and message from a specific person, type from:Person’sName
We hope some of these tips make it into your daily workflow and help you spend less time communicating and more time doing your best work. Learn more about using Twist to the fullest with our best practices, and sign up for the Ambition & Balance newsletter below for updates on new features.
