How to 'Marie Kondo' your Slack

Do you ever have your head down on an urgent task when up pops a Slack notification? You feel the urge to respond right away, but you’ve already got your mojo on with something else.

Even when you know it’ll break your flow, it can be difficult to resist checking notifications when they pop up. You’re probably thinking “What if I miss something important?” or “If I just quickly deal with that I can come back to what I’m doing.”

One of the first things I tell a company when they start using Slack is to reprogram your reaction to notifications, because the reality is most of them don’t need your immediate attention.

As famous organiser and author Marie Kondo taught us about decluttering, first gather your belongings, then one category at a time, go through them and throw away all the things that don’t “spark joy”.

It’s a philosophy that can also be applied to your notifications, and certainly one I encourage.

Turning this from concept to reality is really based on two things. For employees, it’s about a change of mindset. For companies, it’s about setting expectations and communication etiquette to make sure everyone is on the same page and operating in a consistent way with agreed standards.

Slack etiquette: setting the rules of engagement

Many people feel like they’re expected to be online constantly — especially now that we’re working remotely more often. Whether that’s a real or imagined expectation, it’s important to a positive employee experience that organisations avoid creating an ‘always on’ culture.

Being clear about what is or isn’t expected is the first step to training people’s brains to think about productivity differently and to develop better habits.

After all, as Kondo said in her bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, “People cannot change their habits without first changing their way of thinking.”

Here are some helpful house rules:

• @ mention team members if you need their attention — Use @ to tag the person you’re directing your message to, so they can find it without having to keep up with all the conversations happening across all of their channels, all day long.
• Know the difference between using @channel and @here — @channel lets everyone in the channel know about your message, whereas @here only notifies teammates who are online at that time.
• Use emoji reactions — Emoji reactions aren’t just fun, it’s also a good way to acknowledge messages without adding to the noise.
• Reply in thread — Respond to a message directly in thread, so that it doesn’t show up in the main chat stream to avoid cluttering channels.
• Schedule messages to send later — When you have an important message to send, but it’s not the right time to send it, just schedule it for later.

Stopping notifications from ruling your day

Resisting the urge to respond right away doesn’t have to be hard. There are many settings you can take advantage of to stay focused on what matters most.

For example, you can:

• Limit desktop notifications to @ mentions and direct messages.
• Pause notifications for a period of time.
• Set a notification schedule for your work week.
• Turn off notification sounds or other distracting signals.
• Use emojis in your Slack status to let others know about your whereabouts, eg, do not disturb, focus or exercise time.
   

Another good habit to build is using the ‘All Unreads’ feature as your single source of truth for the messages you’ve missed. Instead of switching from one Slack channel to another, you can see all your unread messages in one place and still do all the usual stuff — like react with emoji, reply in thread, and even click on a message’s timestamp to jump to that moment in the channel’s conversation stream.

Smarter automation means fewer notifications

Another way to keep your workflow tidy is to take advantage of smart automation features, like Slackbots. These are easy-to-create, handy robot assistants that hang out in Slack, wait for commands, and find or create the thing you need. For example, you can create reply bots that respond when someone sends a message with a specific phrase.

For the Finance Operations team at SEEK, Slackbots have been hugely beneficial to productivity. The team was previously bogged down with repeat questions from colleagues. When it got to the end of the day, there were up to 300 unanswered queries.

With that level of noise, the Finance Operations team created a custom Slackbot, called Finbot, that fields routine queries. People can now type a simple command in Slack to pull up account details or send a statement by email. This has drastically cut down the number of notifications, and subsequently, the time spent on answering routine questions.

While old habits are hard to kick, if there’s a will, there’s a way. Next time you’re in the middle of something important, don’t let notifications stop you from getting work done.

Marie Kondo would be proud.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/sabelskaya