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Five Slack Hacks to Save the Day

Make your work life simpler, more productive and pleasant with these quick Slack hacks.
Thursday, July 19, 2018

Read about the hacks below, and follow along in the slides for visual cues.

1. Set reminders.

If you consider yourself unorganized and sometimes forgetful, help yourself and your team get organized through this first hack.

  • Set reminders for yourself within Slack with the command /remind me + [what + when]. Slackbot, which functions much like your personal assistant, will confirm and then send you the reminder at the time you requested. Help yourself get through the tasks on your exhaustive to-do list!
  • If there’s a Slack post that requires your action but you don’t have time to get to it, click on “More actions,” and ask Slack to remind you about that post later.
  • Set reminders for others with the command /remind + [@someone or a channel name + what + when]. Managers, send the team reminders to submit their timecards or update project logs.

2. Use emoji replies.

How can you use Slack to help with email burden?

One way is to leverage emojis for shorthand replies, votes, and acknowledgement. If you use emojis productively, you can help eliminate the one-word, reply all emails in your inbox.

Try using emojis to manage workflow within channels. For example, use color emojis to define priorities within a channel. Post a request or work-related question in channel and include a red emoji for high priority, blue for medium priority, or white for low priority.

For someone responding to the request, use the eyes emoji to indicate that you're working on it or looking into it and the green check emoji for when you've completed the request.

3. Use posts.

Do you feel like you spend too much of your day in meetings? With this Slack hack, you can reduce your time spent in meetings.

Use posts to:

  • Create and send editable meeting agendas to a channel ahead of time.
  • Record and share your meeting minutes with posts.
  • Create action items and individuals can check off completed items.

And voila! You’ll run your meetings more efficiently, and who knows? You may get back some desk time.

4. Flag favorites.

You might say, “I don’t need another messaging application to open every day. There is too much ‘noise’ with channels and workspaces.”

This Slack hack can help address that. Flag content that you quickly need to resurface. Prioritize conversations with one or more people.

Two ways to flag or prioritize content:

  • Star a message from someone or star an entire channel. Your starred conversations or channels display at the top of your channel sidebar under Starred.
  • Pin an important message to a channel or a direct message so that you can easily reference. Your pinned items are under your More items menu in the top right corner.

5. Leverage apps.

Doesn’t it seem that information and technology often feel decentralized and disconnected? This Slack hack could build the bridges you need to streamline your workflow.

If you browse your workspace app directory, you’ll see app integrations that have already been enabled.

With apps, you can do things like:

  • Launch a Zoom meeting from Slack with command /zoom + join [meeting ID].
  • Configure Zapier to send starred items to your email or to-do list.
  • Grant access to Google Drive files 10x quicker from within Slack than from within your email inbox.

You can even have a little fun with app integrations. The Giphy app is by far the most popular app integration. Enter the command /giphy + [text] and find the perfect GIF animation to express your thoughts.

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