50 Slack Hacks To Help You Say Goodbye To Email

We designed Slack to supplant email inside your company and better the way your teams work
—no matter their location. Making the switch is easy (and

here are our favorite reasons

for doing so). Plus, many of your most critical email workflows map closely onto Slack. Let’south await at how you can not only re-create them just amend on them too.

Are you

brand-new

to Slack?.

Before diving in to the tips below, cakewalk through our Slack 101 tutorials. You’ll larn how to:

1. Set up Slack
2. Observe and start conversations with your teammates
3. Work in channels, where teams share ideas, make decisions and motion piece of work forwards
4. … and much more

i. Say goodbye to messy email chains and hello to channels

If email is your well-nigh frequently used communication tool, excavation through lengthy reply chains to find the right file or update is “just role of the task.” The default view of a typical e-mail inbox is a list of your by l emails, which could be near anything on globe.

In Slack, all work and conversations are

organized into channels

instead. Each aqueduct is a unmarried place for a group to share messages, files and key decisions around a topic. And like creating your own custom electronic mail folders, channels can be created around projects, topics and teams

Detect and create channels in Slack

Anyone in your arrangement can bring together channels, and y’all’re likely to notice that topics you lot might create emails filters for, such as announcements from HR, already accept a dedicated dwelling in Slack.

If a aqueduct doesn’t exist for a particular topic or project, create i, for example,
#proj-brand-campaign.

Then add together each person involved, forth with key files. Every conclusion and update almost the project can exist in that one like shooting fish in a barrel-to-observe identify, and you lot can movement piece of work forwards together.

2. Give the right people visibility, no cc’ing necessary

Everyone knows the feeling of missing a critical update considering you lot weren’t cc’d on the chain. Most people purposely overdo this to exist safe, adding an entire team of people to any email that mentions one aspect of their work.

But when letters are shared inside a Slack channel, every fellow member of the channel gets that aforementioned visibility.

How it works in Slack

Permit’s say yous have a design question:
Where tin I find our latest set of make guidelines?
Post your question in the
#design-squad
aqueduct, and any designer in your company tin can reply there with the reply.

Equally y’all work in channels, your conversations and files get a searchable annal. When people accept a similar question in the futurity, they tin can search for “brand guidelines” in the
#design-team
aqueduct and find the answer.

iii. Highlight custom keywords to never miss an update

People who spend their workday in electronic mail oftentimes utilize keywords in subject lines to filter out letters. Say y’all’re working on a projection code-named Xanadu. You’d create a filter keyword so whatsoever electronic mail with the give-and-take in it automatically goes to a folder called Xanadu.

In Slack, you can likewise

prepare keywords

that will highlight and send you a notification anytime they’re mentioned. So even though you lot might take a
#proj-xanadu

 channel to hash out everything related to the work at hand, whenever someone mentions the name of your project in other channels, you lot’ll also become a heads-upwards.

Create your ain keywords

Select Preferences in the workspace carte to view your notification settings. Add together keywords that direct use to your surface area of focus (and if yous detect that you get notified oft of unrelated letters, yous tin prune your word list).

4. Mark messages “unread” to come back to them later

People often use their main electronic mail inbox as their to-do list—setting of import messages as “unread” until the requests in them are complete. Slack lets y’all exercise the same.

How it works in Slack

When you get an important message you desire to revisit after, long-press on mobile and tap to marker it as unread, or click the message bill of fare on desktop.

You can likewise set a reminder that’ll prompt yous after from the
Remind me most this
selection.

five. Let coworkers know when you’re out of the function (or just busy)

Anyone who’due south used email is familiar with an automatic response that says, “I’g out for the adjacent ii weeks on vacation. If something is urgent, please contact my team.”

With Slack,

setting a custom status

does this very job. Use it to alert others about impending time off, or permit them know when you’re away and will render.

What your teammates volition see in Slack

Slack comes with five default choices for status, including 📅  in a meeting, 🤒 out sick, and 🌴 on vacation, simply also allows you to create any custom status. If teammates begin writing you a direct bulletin, they’ll meet your condition and can movement alee knowing it’ll take a while to get an reply. Or they can set a reminder to follow up when you’re back.

6. Hone your messages in Drafts

If y’all want to jot down a quick idea or are working on a big announcement, striking the

New Message push

to create a draft. Click downward to the bulletin area and use it as a scratchpad to develop messages you can transport later.

Decide at your convenience which channel or coworker will receive it when it’s set. They’ll e’er appear in the menu under Drafts.

vii. Replace ane-line emails with emoji

There’s an old saying around most offices:

The all-time emails are the ones that were never sent.

The worst? Every note that bluntly says

OK
,

Sounds good

or

Looking at this at present
. In Slack, you lot can

apply emoji reactions

to communicate these points in a click, without cluttering anyone’southward inbox.

How it works in Slack

Allow’s say someone asks you to review a contract in your

#team-legal

channel. When you’re ready to review information technology, mark the message with the 👀 emoji every bit a reaction (anyone tin mouse over that emoji to run into who claimed the task). When you’re done reviewing, mark the message with a ✅. If any changes are suggested, those can be left in the certificate or as a reply in a message thread.

Here are some other time-saving emoji reactions to apply:

• ➕ = I agree
• 👌 = OK, or I understand
• 🎯 = That’s exactly right, you’ve nailed it
• 👏 = Great chore, or well done

Advantages of Slack over email

In improver to the concepts that carry over from electronic mail, Slack unlocks plenty of new opportunities for your team.

Onboard and get to work right away

Raise a mitt if y’all’ve joined a projection or started a job… and accept been stuck waiting for messages to get in to provide context. When you

join channels in Slack
, you tin can simply scroll upward to see all of the context, conversations, ideas and decisions that have been made to date.

Get to the point quickly

In that location’south no need for a generic greeting, bailiwick line or endmost salutation in Slack messages. You lot just type your asking. Multiply that by hundreds of interactions a twenty-four hour period, and you’ll rapidly realize how much time you can save in a year from your entire workforce.

Cut down on context switching

Slack is more than than a hub for conversations and files; it as well connects with

more than ii,200 other apps

you might already be using. Use those apps to get file previews and grant access to others, report into Slack when tasks or milestones are completed, receive calendar updates, and more—all without switching betwixt windows or tabs.

Stay looped in past default

While email isolates conversations to the people included in To and Cc fields, everyone in a channel sees the same conversations. That means anyone in the group tin popular in to come across progress being made, view the latest drafts and mockups, and check on outstanding approvals. Equally a outcome, weekly status meetings can focus on larger milestones and challenges (or be washed away with entirely).

Go on track of important information

Don’t permit vital info go cached in an inbox. In Slack you can

relieve messages

for your own employ and

pin messages

to channels for everyone to see. Use either to track and highlight what’s important to you lot.

Achieve teammates faster

A abiding trouble of working anywhere (especially when you’re new) is knowing where to detect anyone or who to ask for information. In Slack you can come across everyone’south profile, search for their recent contributions to get a feel for their areas of expertise, and reach them via directly message. If your message is time-sensitive, y’all tin can

mention them direct

to grab their attention with a notification.

Streamline communication with partners

If you’re on a paid version of Slack, you can bring all these benefits to your piece of work with external organizations through

Slack Connect
. Use channels in Slack Connect to keep clients, accounts, agencies and partners in the loop and give everyone a shared view of progress and success.

This way of working also means no more thinking virtually whether to contact someone using SMS or WhatsApp, email or Facebook Messenger. Instead, all your workplace communication is in i tidy place: Slack.

Prepare to motility your team from electronic mail to Slack? Go started here.