Slack Productivity Tips

I want to improve my use of Slack, so that I can be on top of channels and communication that take place in my company’s workspace.

The following tips are some of the ones that I use and I’ve gathered them from exploring Slack as well as from helpful collegues.

I went years without changing anything but the color scheme of Slack. I guess that’s a testament to the default setup of Slack.

Group together channels

Channels can be grouped together and, it’s called sections. I create sections for channels around a common theme. No endless scroll in the list of channels, and you can jump directly to the section if you don’t know what the name of the channel is you’re looking for, but you know which section it’s part of.

e.g.

• team
  • ongoing-projects
  • afterwork

Sections can be collapsed to take up less space. To create a section, press the ⋮ and then select Create new section.

Channels for short lived topics

When I have the chance I try and move conversation from direct messages into topic channels. This is especially important if there are multiple people involved and there is a need for more people to join in the future.

When a specific topic’s task is completed, it gets archived and therefore removed from the list of channels.

This approach makes it a lot easier to find information, because you’re more likely to know the name of the topic than which persons where involved or what to search for in all of Slack to find that one important message.

Quick emoji action

Slack allows you to have three emojis directly available on the context menu instead of having to click through to the emoji window and find them in the collection. This is very convenient if you quickly want to relay some information without writing a message. I currently use

• 👀 I’m looking into it
• ✔ It has been done
• 👍 Nice job!

Instead of handpicking the emojis yourself, you can let Slack pin your three most used ones.

Remove user image

To try and slim down the UI a bit, I’ve opted to not show images of my collegues.

Use key bindings

I strive to not use the mouse for ergonomic reasons as well as a personal challenge, and it forces you to figure out the key bindings of an application. These are some of the key bindings that I frequently use in Slack.

• Ctrl + k navigate to person or channel
• Alt + left navigate back
• Alt + right navigate forward
• Ctrl + u upload a file to a conversation or channel

There are a lot more key bindings, which can be found in Help --> Keyboard Shortcuts

Written by

Andreas