How To Use Slack For Increased Productivity?

Slack revolutionized workplace communication since its inception. However, both managers and employees haven’t tapped into the full potential of this amazing tool. When you use Slack effectively, you can make workflows smoother and enhance the productivity of your organization.

Use these tips to use Slack effectively and enhance productivity:

1. Limit notifications

In the professional world, every company has its own availability standards. Even when working from home, there’s an expectation to respond within a specific timeframe. However, there are moments when you’re deeply engrossed in a critical task, and it’s wise to step away from Slack temporarily to concentrate on your work. No need to activate “Do Not Disturb” mode and be rude to your coworkers. Instead, simply pause your notifications. This subtly informs your team that you’re dedicated to a particular task and should only be interrupted if it’s truly essential.

2. Use Slack Connect

Slack used to be a tool solely focused on intracompany communication. Whenever, you needed to connect with other businesses for supplies, logistics, or anything else, you needed to switch to a different tool. Instead, it’s best to streamline communication with Slack Connect. It’s a much better platform instead of email. When you centralize all business communication under one umbrella, you can save a lot of time. 

3. Show only unread channels

When you are in a big organization and need to communicate with several teams, you’ll end up subscribing to tens or even hundreds of channels. Keeping track of all these channels becomes exceedingly difficult. You may have decided to mute a few channels. However, that way you’ll miss out on several important messages. Instead, it’s better to set up Slack to show only Unread channels. To pull this off:

• Go to the left-hand sidebar and select “Channels”
• Hover your mouse over “Channels” and click on the three dots.
• Scroll down to Show and choose “Unread channels only” instead of “All your channels”.

4. Search through Slack

If you aren’t using the search function on Slack, you are definitely missing out. With the search function, you don’t need to scroll endlessly to track down an important message or file in a conversation thread. Instead, you can simply search for a few keywords and get to that point in conversation. You can make this easier by using hashtags and starting important conversations.

5. Don’t stress about storage     

If you have a small organization you’re probably using the free version of Slack. Unfortunately, the free version comes with certain restrictions and one of them is storage. When you have exchanged enough pictures and files on Slack, it will start showing you pop-ups for upgrading to a premium plan. If you are tight on cash flow, there’s no need to worry about those notifications. You can continue sending messages and files and they will continue to be “rolled off” in the archive.  If you’re a newbie on Slack, it might feel a bit tricky at first. But once you get the hang of the tips mentioned above and explore more, you’ll become more at ease with this tool and streamline your work. When you unleash the true power of Slack, things start running super smoothly.