![]() ![]() Team communications on Slack can quickly turn into social communications, with emojis, GIFs and other unessential content. Your communications strategy should include other ways to convey information or ask for help, such as seeking out someone in person for urgent issues, setting up meetings for important tasks, and using email for important issues and "everything else," Longino says. ![]() Important issues can be communicated via Slack channel updates and tasks, while "everything else" items could be handled via Slack channels. For example, for urgent issues, communicate via Slack direct messages or mentions. “Only interrupt people for something that’s truly urgent,” Longino advises. And "everything else" is a big bucket for tasks that are “not yet crucial to your team’s work,” he says.įrom there, determine the most effective way to communicate tasks in each bucket. ![]() Important topics aren’t time-sensitive but require someone to take responsibility for them and get them done. Urgent topics are both important and time-sensitive. Prioritize your communications into three buckets: urgent, important and everything else, suggests Trevor Longino, chief marketing officer for Unito, which develops software to integrate project management apps. Develop a hierarchy for all communications. To stop Slack notifications during certain hours, go into Slack's notification preferences and set an automatic Do Not Disturb schedule. Since then, Chen Rekhi sets DND hours at night and at other times to minimize distractions - and to prevent her smartphone from buzzing with messages from overseas colleagues. And there was the time she was at a birthday party, answering urgent Slack messages from work colleagues when she should have been “celebrating my friend,” she says. “They've created a work context where co-workers don’t mind messaging you at all hours of the day, even times when they wouldn’t feel comfortable texting you.”Ĭhen Rekhi said her own Slack overload became apparent to her when she noticed herself driving around Palo Alto, Calif., reading Slack messages on her Apple Watch. Slack direct messages are “just as interruptive as text messages,” says Ada Chen Rekhi, founder and chief operating officer at Notejoy, a developer of document collaboration software. Even so, many Slack users believe in DND’s power to help them stay focused for periods of time - and to reclaim their personal time. Don’t be shy about using Do Not Disturb.īlocking notifications via Slack’s DND feature during the entire workday isn’t going to work for everyone. While they’re geared toward Slack in particular, you can apply similar techniques to most team messaging platforms. If that sounds too extreme, we’ve got some other suggestions: Here are 10 tips and strategies for minimizing Slack disruptions and maximizing your productivity. “By adding a little bit of friction to Slack and making it a little harder for engineers to get interrupted, we saw a significant increase in both the volume and the quality of the engineering team’s output,” he adds. Direct-message traffic dropped by 40%, while the amount of code written grew 34%, Moore says. “On those days, engineers basically didn’t write any code, and the people they were chatting with didn’t get much done either.”īoomerang’s solution - turning on Slack’s Do Not Disturb (DND) feature for everyone in the company during business hours - may seem counterintuitive. “We had a couple weeks where people sent over 500 direct messages in Slack a day,” Moore says. ![]()
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