Henderson’s Top 5 Slack tips

Set up Slack for your workday

You can manage your settings to only receive notifications during working hours. This minimises disturbances

when you’ve clocked off. Also for those who travel (something which I do often) you can adjust your timezone so that your teammates around the globe know your local time. Set customised statuses to let your team know what you’re up to — for example if you’re working remotely, in a meeting or on holiday, so they easily see your availability.

Emojis

Emojis aren’t just for personal use, they have business benefits too. In Slack we use a lot of emojis, they add tone and sentiment to written communication, as well as allowing us to pass on feedback quicker. For example, reacting with a green tick is more efficient than typing out separate lines of approval.

Mute channels

For users that are in multiple channels, muting those that are either rarely used or perhaps that contain non-urgent information can be a great way to focus on the ones that are of the most importance.

Pin posts

Pinning posts is a great way to store important messages sent in the channel. Similarly, starring messages provides an additional way to highlight and keep track of useful information.

The quick switcher

Slack is full of keyboard shortcuts, but my favourite and most useful is the quick switcher. Use this to quickly toggle between different channels or conversations. On Mac hit CMD-K and on PC its Ctrl-K.