Jamon’s Favorite Slack Hacks
At Infinite Red, I’ve garnered a reputation as a Slack geek. For better or worse.
I read and send thousands of messages per week. Only Todd Werth rivals me in this department at our company.
Using Slack as my primary work app has allowed me to refine my process over time. Despite being in hundreds of channels, I never feel like I’m way behind on Slack. That’s because I use a few hacks to keep things sane.
Let’s dive in.
Notifications
Let’s be honest, notifications are at best a necessary evil. They are thought interrupters, attention grabbers, and…
Sorry, just had a notification. What was I talking about?
Oh, notif —
For Pete’s sake. I’m going into Do Not Disturb mode.
Slack Hack 1. When I’m working on something important and want to focus, I turn on Do Not Disturb mode.
You can also use /dnd 10 minutes from a message compose box as a shortcut!
People can always override the notification if they really need my attention, but the extra “Do you want to send the notification anyway?” confirm box makes them think twice.
Slack Hack 2: Set default notification preferences
If you haven’t customized your default notification preferences recently, you definitely need to. In some cases, Slack has new options that you may not have discovered yet.
You can also customize your notifications for each channel — for example, I set the channel that the Infinite Red owners use to talk to each other to “notify always”, because it’s low-noise and high-priority often.
BONUS TIP: go to the Sidebar option and choose Unreads and Starred Conversations to clean up your sidebar. You can also order by “Scientific” which puts your most frequently used channels first.
Slack Hack 3: Mute channels (like unsubscribe, but for Slack!)
Not every channel needs my full attention all the time. For example, in my role as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) I don’t need to know every time someone updated a Trello card in a random client project.
There are a couple options to reduce noise from lower-priority channels: muting and leaving.
The option I prefer is to mute the channel. I am courteous and leave a message so people know I’m not reading every message:
Hey everyone! To reduce Slack noise, I’m muting this channel. If you want me to see something, just @ me and I’ll see it. 👋
Leaving the channel is the other option. If you choose this option, also be courteous and leave a note in the channel, something like this:
Hey everyone! I’m leaving this channel to reduce my Slack noise. However, if you need my attention, don’t be afraid to invite me back in and tag me on the appropriate message. 👋
It only takes a moment to leave a message like this and others really appreciate it.
Here’s a gotcha: when you click “Mute entire channel” the Notifications options below the Muting options will go away (see above screenshot). However, the options selected will (usually) still apply. (This feels like a Slack user experience issue.)
So if you still want to get notifications when your name is mentioned (or not) or want to ignore @channel and @here mentions (or not), set those before choosing Mute entire channel.
BONUS TIP: Star channels that you really need to keep an eye on, such as your current project. That will keep them on top of your sidebar.
Catching Up
Sometimes it can feel like I’m way behind on unread channels, even though I’ve muted many. Luckily, I have some hacks for dealing with this.
Slack Hack 4: The Command+T <enter> shortcut
When I have lots of unread channels, I go through them quickly without using the mouse by hitting Cmd+T (or Cmd+K) and then <enter> (or <return>, either work — and on Windows, it’s Ctrl+K <enter>.) Since I have the setting enabled for “Start me at the newest channel but leave unseen messages unread”, I’ll then hit Esc to clear the “read” status of the channel.
Using this methodology, I can quickly blast through a bunch of channels.
Slack Hack 5: The “asdf” bookmark
If I see something that catches my eye as I’m doing the Cmd+T <enter> hack but don’t want to respond right away, I’ll put asdf in the message compose box and move on.
When I get to the end of my unreads, Cmd+T will re-surface partially-composed (decomposed?) messages, including my asdf. This brings me back to the relevant channel so I don’t forget about it.
BONUS TIP: I also (more rarely) set Slack reminders. The problem with reminders is they are easily ignored, so if you do this you must never just ignore reminders. If you can’t deal with the issue right away, you have to snooze them for later. Or you can use some combination of reminders and the “asdf” hack — whatever works!
Slack Hack 6: Going back through history
If you are moving through channels and then think, I should really respond to that thing I saw a few channels back, you can scroll back through your channel history. On desktop use Cmd/Ctrl+[ and Cmd/Ctrl+] (the keys to the right of “P”) and on mobile you can swipe with two fingers left or right. I’ve also found this very helpful for copying and pasting things from one channel to another.
Other Hacks
Slack Hack 7: Activity Panel
I keep the Activity Panel open all the time, unless I’m viewing a thread. Just click the @ button on the top right (or hit Cmd+Shift+M) and you’ll see how people are interacting with your recent messages. It’s also a quick way to jump back to those messages.
Slack Hack 8: Getting the most from threads
Threads are a great feature in Slack, but sadly lack in two key areas:
- It’s hard for people to know exactly when to use them and when not to — correcting them often feels like you’re being an annoying “hall monitor”
- Participating in a thread either subscribes you to a bunch of notifications you don’t want — or sometimes not participating in a thread means you miss important context
Even with the limitations, threads are really useful. You should probably use threads a lot more than you do right now. The more your team gets used to using threads, the better. Threads help improve the “signal-to-noise” ratio in channels and keep a good differentiation between topic and discussion.
When you’re posting a topic in a channel and want people to thread, don’t @ them in the main message. Write out your topic (prepended with “TOPIC:”) and then tag the people you want to respond in a thread.
This helps people understand your desire to thread responses and keeps high-signal channels cleaner and easier to follow.
If someone doesn’t follow the threading norms, just tag them in the thread and continue the conversation there. Don’t be a jerk: just say something like “Hey Gant Laborde, in response to your question about X, I think…” It’s not perfect, but it works.
Wrapping up
Slack isn’t a perfect tool, but by configuring your settings and learning some habits, you can make the most of it. I find that it’s pretty effortless these days to keep an eye on our entire company with many active projects.
Getting through all my email is a different story. But I have a post for that too.
Want more Slack tips from me? Check out 5 Slack Channels Every Company Needs. If you’d like more in-depth resources, check out our Remote Work Handbook and the Building Infinite Red podcast.
