4 Tips to increase productivity with Slack in 2022!
In my 11+ years of software development career, I have used all kinds of team communication apps like Flock, MS Teams, HipChat, etc. But none of them have stuck and grown on me like how Slack has.
I have been using it for over 6 years now. Though the app excels at what it's supposed to or intends to do, I do see many of my colleagues struggling daily with some issues, they are listed below —
- Lots of unread messages in DM and Channels.
- Lots of interruptions with constant notification
(And God bless you if you sit close to someone who has their speaker volume up & gets constant messages! Don’t believe me? Play this video and decide for yourself 😈) - Unable or forgets to reply.
(In today’s age of WFH, this can often be perceived by many that you are not at your desk or working, which may not be true!)
So in this post, I will run you through some of the tips and tricks I have learned and used which have made my Slack experience so joyful and stress-free!
1. Mute/Leave Channels
I can’t stress enough, how important it is to mute or leave the channels which aren’t important to you. As software engineers living in the age of microservices, it is common in many companies to have 1 channel for code review, another one for deployment, one for general topics, a private one for the team to communicate, and so forth for each microservice!
Even for small-medium-sized companies, this number of channels that one joins can easily grow to 3 digits, and what follows is a wave of constant notifications and chaos. So like many others, I do join such channels if and when needed but I do make it point to quickly mute the channel when my work there is done.
2. Scheduled Messages
“Scheduled messages” in Slack has been around for quite some time, but I haven’t seen many people actively using it. For me, it's a game-changing feature. Especially in the hybrid-WFH era, where many teams are working from different time zones, this feature comes handy.
So if you have a message to send, but it’s already out of office hours and you don’t want to disturb your teammates. And if by not sending the message now, there is a good chance that you might forget what you wanted to send and to whom, then this feature is just for you. You can read more about this feature here.
When you have an important message to share in Slack but it’s not the best time to send it quite yet, you can schedule it. Select a date and time in the future and rest assured your message will be sent whether you’re at your desk or on the go.
(Some of my teammates reading this article will now know why do get messages from me strictly at 09:00 AM on some days 😉)
3. Drafts
Drafts is a fairly new feature in Slack, which I am pretty sure you might have already run into by accident.
So have you ever been in a situation where you have started typing a message to someone, only to find your attention needed in another channel or conversation? Drafts are just for that, those unsent messages now appear in a dedicated Drafts section in your sidebar, so you can easily jump back to them whenever you’re ready to hit send.
I kind of extend this feature (or abuse it! 😜) way beyond what it was originally meant for, to the extent that it works as a Slack to-do list for me, let me explain how.
Throughout the day at work, you must be receiving a lot of messages. Some of the messages are for reading and FYI, some require you to reply. From the ones where you need to reply, there will be some that you cannot reply to right away, the reasons can be many
- You read the message while on the move, or in the toilet and want to reply when you are back at your desk
- You need to check something or with someone before you can reply
- You need to check the data/file/article being sent before you can reply
But there is a good chance that you will forget to reply, right? As the message once read is gone from the notification and now only lies in your mental memory.
To overcome this, I usually just type some text in DM/Channels where I need to reply but I am not quite ready yet. And later I can jump to Draft section (screenshot below) and see a list of unfinished messages that I need to finish and send out. This way I am able to make sure none of the messages sent to me that requires my attention and reply are missed.
4. Filter channels by “unread”
Last but not least, filter your channels and only list the channels which have unread messages and need your attention. This can be done by selecting the 3 dots next to “Channels” and selecting the “Unread channels only” option as shown in the image below.
This will make sure your sidebar is leaner and cleaner and only has channels where your attention is required. This option, however, will remove all the read channels. If not already using it, you can use CTRL + K or Command + K and search for any channel and jump to it.
Conclusion
So, these were some of the tricks I use to keep my Slack under control, and end every single day with 0 unread messages 💪. Hope you found some of these useful, feel free to comment if you are using something that I have missed.
Happy slacking! 🚀
