Five Slack Productivity Hacks

Here at WebDesignBoom we’re always looking for new ways to boost our productivity and one of the latest tools we’ve been using is Slack (we’re very late to the party – we know!). It’s one of the world’s most popular messaging apps and team management systems but most users only tap into a tiny fraction of what Slack can really do. As we’ve been getting to grips with the system we’ve stumbled across some handy ways Slack can boost your productivity, so today we’re sharing our top five Slack productivity hacks.

1. Google Drive Integration

One of the best things about Slack is that it’s able to integrate with numerous other web applications, including Google Drive. If you and your team use Google Drive to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets then you should think about connecting Google Drive and Slack so your documents can be shared in team messages.

Staying on the topic of Google, don’t forget you can also integrate your Google Calendar with Slack – a life saver when it comes to keeping all your organisation in one place.

2. Contact Everyone

Need to get the attention of your entire team but don’t want to waste time sending the same message to everybody? You don’t need to. Simply direct your message to @everyone and it’ll go out to the whole team. Additionally, @group and @channel can be used in the same way, with @here notifying everybody who’s currently online.

3. Slackbot Responses

Do you lose time every week answering questions that you’ve already answered plenty of times before? Is there certain data or information that you all keep forgetting and have to remind each other of on a regular basis? If so, consider setting up Slackbot responses to certain keywords or phrases.

For example, team members keep forgetting the contact email for your WordPress agency? Add a Slackbot response to the phrase ‘WordPress agency’ and they’ll get an automatic message reminding them of the email address. There are plenty of ways to utilise this tool, so get creative!

4. Enhanced Reminders

The reminder tool is one of the fundamental elements of Slack, but did you know there’s a lot more to reminders than just, well, reminding you what you need to do? If you can’t remember everything on your to do list for the day, use the command ‘/remind list’ to bring up a full list of all your reminders. Or, if you’ve already achieved something without needing the reminder (in which case, go you for being so organised!) hit ‘/remind cancel (task ID)’ to remove it from your list.

5. Formatting Shortcuts

Rather than wasting time formatting your text, Slack has some handy ways to format a document in a matter of seconds. A few key ones to remember:

• around words = bold

_ around words = italics

< around words = quotes

(Bonus Tip)

If all else fails and you simply don’t know what you say, type /shrug to treat your team to a nifty

¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

So there you have it, five tips and tricks for Slack that you might have missed. Is there something missing from our list? Don’t forget to let us know in the comments so we can add it!