How To 10X Your Slack Productivity

Slack is full of hacks you can use to unlock maximum productivity for working with anyone.

Schedule Messages

Do you work from home and feel like you can never truly disconnect because of the need to always be available? Automated messages can fill the void of appeared productivity outside of normal working hours.

Heading out on vacation and want to keep a project moving? Schedule questions you’d ask your teammates. Don’t want to wake up early to send that Monday morning status update? Schedule a bullet list of last week’s accomplishment and losses. Want to convince your team you’re working from London for a week while your in the state of Montana — a good spot, tactically, speaking — shift your out of office message to post 9 hours earlier.

🔥Pro Tip — schedule follow up messages several minutes apart to appear like you’re engaging in a conversation. While you may miss vital context, 1 or 2 messages won’t fully dispel the illusion.

Deactivate Your Account

Sometimes you want to enter your realm of concentration void of notification and obligation. Append your display name and full name with (deactivated) and layer the “This account is deactivated” banner on your Avatar. Your account will be fine and free of notifications. Use sparingly — coworkers may become unconvinced over time your account is truly deactivated. Impersonating someone else is always an option, but that may skirt what’s acceptable in the workplace and likely result in termination thus permanently deactivating your Slack account.

Obtain A Persona

At smaller companies it’s far easier for you to know your team mates. As teams grow and more employees use Slack, it becomes harder to know who to talk to. Obtaining a persona and cultivating it through team and public channels tells teammates you are an authority on a subject and you should receive all of the Slack messages.

It wouldn’t be normal to encounter Wild West characters in most companies but in Slack, we can become anyone and I’m infected with the callings of the cowboy’s life. I’ve added a hat and beard to appear more mysterious than I really am hoping my teammates believe I’m sending Slack messages from a Dude Ranch in Wyoming (I’m not). My proficiencies are in engineering but I’ll send the occasional “Yee-haw” and “Howdy friend!” to build credibility I’m a fun person you can Slack any time for help.

🔥Pro tip — change your persona every now and then to be a cultural icon in your company’s Slack channels. When a Slack persona becomes too popular, it will imprint on your teammates and they’ll naturally copy your style. Pivot to something new to keep things fresh.

Use Emoji 💪😎🤳

Emoji are an important part of Slack and are useful for communicating complex thoughts and feelings. You can save teammates the hassle of typing out sentences of praise or questions by attaching emoji reactions you want to receive on a message reducing the need for excess notifications

You don’t need to channel College Student Athlete on the emoji reacts — up to 3 emoji is normal.