7 Essential Tips for Slack Users

A lot of teams are moving their internal communication away from email and into messaging apps, such as Slack. Slack has become ane of the most popular tools that groups utilise to communicate and collaborate, simply it'south not necessarily any more than efficient than electronic mail on its ain.

To get the most out of Slack, you need to make sure you're using some of the primal features that make the app different from e-mail.

Get Organized A lot productivity tips I've seen for Slack involve learning keyboard shortcuts, connecting third-party apps, and setting up automatic commands using IFTTT. Those kinds of things are indeed useful, but I call up you tin get more return on time invested by starting with concentrating on essential features, customizations, and best practices. These are both simple to learn and likely to have an outsized impact on your Slack efficiency.

ane. Add Notifications for Keywords and Phrases

To have a productive experience on Slack, one of the very commencement settings you should adjust is your notifications. You should focus in particular on notifications for words that have special meaning to you.

Click on your proper name at the top left and select Preferences. Get to Notification Settings. Scroll downwards to where you encounter Highlighted Words. Any words or phrases you type hither will trigger an alert whenever someone uses them.

Slack - Highlighted Words

Y'all don't need to utilise quotation marks for terms of more than one word, and words are not case sensitive.

2. Customize Channel Notifications

Not every channel that you join is necessarily every bit of import every bit the others, and you might not want to hear a bing, ring, ding, buzz, or boop every time someone in a channel mentions makes an @everyone shout out. Besides, at that place may be some channels that utilise keywords that are important to you, but their utilise in a particular channel is not. Y'all can exclude notifications for keywords and phrases from selected channels.

Slack - Channel Notifications

Start by going to the aqueduct y'all want to adapt. At the top of the page, click on the proper noun of the channel, then select Channel notification preferences. Make your adjustments in the box that appears.

iii. Utilize @Everyone and @Channel Sparingly

This productivity tip is more nigh Slack etiquette than any special characteristic or choice: Use @everyone and @channel sparingly.

Using either of these callouts is the equivalent of sending an email blast to everyone, something you and your team may exist trying to avoid past using Slack in the first place.

4. Add Slack Email Aliases to Your Contacts

I honey that teams tin can send messages into Slack past forwarding emails to a special address. But I detest that the email addresses are gobbledygook.

Do yourself a favor by adding the Slack electronic mail aliases to your address volume and giving them a more memorable name. For example, if you use e-mail forwarding to alarm your team of press coverage, name the Slack e-mail address Slack Press Coverage. If you utilize it to frontwards news, call it Slack News. That way, when your brain thinks of sending an email to Slack, your fingers can showtime typing "Slack," which simply makes sense.

Slack - Email Aliases

Notice your email aliases (or set them upwards) by going to the team's Apps and Custom Integrations setting. A new page will open. Select Configure at the peak right. Look for Email. To get an electronic mail accost that'southward already set up, select Edit Configurations. You tin can copy and paste the alias from there.

5. Blazon / for Commands and Shortcuts

Y'all could spend a lot of time learning commands and keyboard shortcuts, just I call back a better employ of time for non-ability users of Slack is to simply remember that you lot can type a forward slash at the beginning of whatever message and run into a list of options for commands.

Slack - command

Choose the command yous want from the list past just typing the side by side letter of that command.

vi. Add Reminders

Once you open upwardly the world of quick commands in Slack, one that'south worth learning is Reminders. Type "/reminder" and let Slack prompt yous to fill in the rest.

Slack - Reminders

Yous can add reminders for yourself, your teammates, or a whole channel. You can fix a reminder, for instance, to alert everyone on your team to empty out the fridge Fri at four:40 p.one thousand.

vii. Add Color to Your Sidebar

If you utilise Slack for more than 1 group or purpose, it can get confusing to jump from business relationship to account, unless yous fix dissimilar themes for your sidebars.

Slack - Themes

I recommend choosing themes that are near different from one some other to help you quickly and easily recognize which team you're in at any given fourth dimension.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.