How we’re Slacking at Ticketleap
Some of our office finds Slack to be distracting, but we all understand its value. Instead of breaking up with Slack, we wanted to help our coworkers be smart about how they use it.
The great thing about Slack is also the worst thing about Slack — you have access to all communication at all times. We want to keep it as easy as possible for people to get ideas and information into Slack. That means the onus is on each of us to manage how we get those ideas and information out of Slack.
The two rules that help us manage Slack
- Focus time is important to getting great work done — set up your notifications & communication flow such that Slack is not interrupting your focus time.
- Your coworkers won’t be in Slack all of the time — because of rule #1, you might not get a real-time response in Slack. Don’t hold back on communicating in there, people will catch up when they are ready.
Things to do to optimize for focus time
Do not disturb
If you know you are about to start working on a project and need to focus, you can snooze notifications for as long as you need. Click the bell beside Ticketleap and snooze notifications:
Worried someone will need to reach you for something important while your notifications are snoozed? Fret not, this is what they’ll see if they message you:
If they decide to click here their message will send right away.
Channel Notifications
Even when you’re not on snooze, getting notified about everything at all times is intense. You can set channel notifications by going into each channel. Turning off desktop notifications for high volume channels like #random will dramatically improve your life.
When you click on Channel notification preferences:
- You can turn all notifications off or keep mentions on.
- Suppressing @channel and @here notifications are a good idea as well. Since we’re talking about them, now is a good time to mention that @channel, @everyone and @here are terrible and you should never use them. If there is an emergency, use the #emergency channel; everyone has mobile notifications turned on for this channel.
- “Mute this channel” is a great option if you want to be able to go in and read a channel when you feel like it, without getting notified of how many new messages come in throughout the day.
Slack Discussion
If you are expecting discussion on something you post in Slack, create a post or a snippet. That way, people can comment on it and all of those comments will be attached to the thing you shared. This helps others who see it hours later stay on top of the conversation and feel organized. Alternately, start another channel specifically for that discussion and link to the new channel.
Why we think Slack is important at Ticketleap
Slack isn’t supposed to pull you into more conversations than email did. It is supposed to make sure the right people have access to the right conversations whenever they need it.
Think about people working from home, or missing a day due to illness, or being able to integrate back into work right away after being on parental leave, Slack is super helpful in a way that email and in-person is not. Because of Slack, you don’t need to be in the room to catch important discussions. Because of Slack, you don’t need to be on an email chain to be in the conversation. People don’t need to follow everything on Slack, but it is great that they have access to everything.
Nobody needs to go to all meetings that happen at Ticketleap. Same goes for reading everything in Slack. I trust everyone at Ticketleap to be smart about how they stay up-to-speed on what’s going on.
