The 5 Killer Slack Tips To Boost Your Productivity

Working from home is now the norm because of the coronavirus.

Prior to the pandemic, having a quick question for a team member means walking over to their desk, asking, then moving on. That seemingly basic interaction no longer happens for many of us right now.

Many teams already used online messaging app Slack before as well, but didn’t rely heavily on it. But as we work today in different locations across the globe, more and more use it heavily.

To make the most out of the tool, here are several useful Slack tips so you can maximise communications within your team while remaining productive.

Never forget meetings with Slackbot

Since working from home, many of us found that it’s become so easy to get so caught up working that we forget upcoming meetings. You can avoid this by using Slackbot.

For the uninitiated, Slackbot is a chatbot that you can use to send yourself reminders, like an upcoming important meeting. You can also use Slackbot as a notification 15 minutes before said event, so that you can make it there on time and prepared.

You can also use Slackbot as a reminder for personal appointments so you can recall to give your team a heads up in case you’re going to be unavailable at a specific time or day.

To use Slackbot:

Click on the Slackbot channel.
Type, for example, “Remind me at 1:45 that I have a meeting with the marketing team at 2 tomorrow”.
Slackbot will then reply: “I will remind you that ‘I have a meeting with the marketing team at 2 tomorrow’ at 1:45PM”.

Slackbot will also give you the option to delete your reminder or view other reminders.

Use the “Do not Disturb” feature

Sometimes, we need an hour or so of uninterrupted time to complete a task or project. Unfortunately, incoming chats and notifications won’t help you with that need.

Slack, however, gives you the option to pause notifications however long you need, and inform your team that you have “Do Not Disturb” turned on if they want to send you a message. If a concern is urgent, team members can message you with a notification anyway, so you won’t miss out on anything important.

To activate “Do Not Disturb”:

Click your account’s icon on the upper right corner of the software.
Click “Pause notifications”.
Select the amount of time you need.

Mute channels

Does your organisation send out many group messages through several channels? It’s convenient to contact specific groups in mere clicks, but you probably don’t need to read all the messages throughout your workday. Especially if they’re for someone else.

Otherwise, you’ll be constantly bombarded by notifications. Fortunately, Slack allows you to remain in the channel while muting incoming messages. Here’s how:

Right-click the channel you want to mute. This will bring up a context menu.
Select “Mute channel”.

Mute direct messages

We’ve all experienced that one colleague who has a dozen stories to tell about their weekend, so they inundate you with messages while you’re in a meeting with your team.

Here’s a quick and easy Slack tip: You can keep distracting notifications away without missing important messages by muting specific individuals without them knowing. The steps are as follows:

Select the direct message (DM) or channel you want to mute.
Type the command “/mute”.

You can unmute by typing “/mute” again.

How to pin messages

Have you ever received a message that you frequently need to refer to? Our last the Slack tips: Pin important messages so that you can easily access them. It’s simple:

Hover over the message you want to pin,
Click the three vertical dots.
Select “Pin to this conversation”.

You’ll know it worked if you see a push pin icon under the name of the person you’re direct-messaging. Click this icon to see everything you’ve pinned between that person and yourself.