How to Customize Slack So It Stops Murdering Your Productivity
Not gonna lie — dumping Slack can be a pretty tempting idea. My social media startup relies on it a lot (and I mean a lot), but it can also drive you completely insane with its constant interruptions, notifications, and unread messages.
So I can’t blame anyone for cutting the cord — but I do think it’s a bad idea to drop such a useful tool before trying to find a way to make it work. Getting rid of a tool without having customized it is like returning your computer because you don’t like the desktop background. It isn’t supposed to be exactly what you want out of the box.
That’s why I’m sharing this overview of how I modified my own app. I get the reasons why it’s frustrating for a lot of people (I hate being interrupted all the time), so consider this a guide to setting up Slack so that it’s actually useful — not a nuisance.
Mobile notifications
For the love of god, turn these off!
You’ll never be able to focus if you have your desktop AND your phone blowing up with Slack. And for those times when you’re not at your computer? Easy — stop working! Take a break. You’re never going to be that productive on your phone. Besides, having an entire conversation on that little keyboard takes forever — I don’t care how nimble your thumbs are.
Do not disturb
This is a trick. Don’t fall for it.
Even if you disable notifications by turning on Do Not Disturb mode when you’re off the clock, it’s too easy (and WAY too tempting) to pop open Slack when you shouldn’t. If you’re not working, sign out!
(You should totally use Do Not Disturb temporarily during your regular working hours, though, when you need a little space. Just don’t rely on it as an alternative to logging all the way out at the end of the day.)
Notification settings
First, go in your preferences and make sure this option is selected:
This makes sure you’re getting notifications if (and only if) someone says your name — whether or not they tag you with an @-mention. It’s everyone’s responsibility to bring relevant people into their conversations by saying their name — not YOUR responsibility to constantly monitor every conversation just in case they need your input!
(Plus, if you’re really paranoid about missing it when someone says your name, you can click the @ button in the top right to see a list of your recent mentions.)
Now, even more importantly, change this setting:
By default, Slack encourages you to backtrack and read old conversations you’ve missed. If you’re trying to read every last message on Slack, though, let me make something clear: you’re doing it wrong.
Slack is NOT meant to be an insane inbox that you can never catch up on! (No matter WHAT they say about how they reduce the amount of emails you receive.) Their settings assume that you need to check every unread message, but generally, you don’t.
Individual channel notifications
Did you know that you can (and should) set different notification preferences for different channels? Did you know that it’s one of the most valuable ways to reduce the excess noise level on Slack?
This is the setting you should have for any channel that’s potentially relevant to you. If you’re using slack with just a few people, this will probably be most of the channels. But if you’re working with more than 10 people, you probably need to go one step further and actually mute some channels. (More on that in a sec.)
These settings mean you’ll only get an actual alert when someone in that channel mentions you by name in a message, or uses the @channel or @here tags. (You can turn those off, too, if people in your business tend to use them a lot, and you don’t really need to know about everything that goes on in that channel.) Because you haven’t muted the channel, if there are unread messages in there, it’ll show up as bold in your sidebar.
Speaking of muting the channel, though, this is exactly what you need to do for any channel that isn’t very relevant to you specifically.
It’s one of the most productivity-saving features in Slack, and most people don’t even know it exists!
Mute channels early and often. This feature makes it so the channel isn’t bolded in the sidebar when it has new messages in it, so you don’t have to deal with that “I have a bunch of different inboxes that are constantly filling up” feeling.
Which channels should you mute? Most of them! Make muting a channel your default, and only unmute channels when you want/need to be up to date on every conversation that happens there — this is usually only the channel(s) specific to your team.
You can still go into all those other rooms, and you’ll still get alerts if/when your name is mentioned inside, but you won’t be distracted by them all day long when you don’t need to be. (And if you don’t even want them in your sidebar at all, just go in the room and type /leave.)
Here’s what mine looks like:
As a marketing-focused CEO, this is what I’ve chosen to focus on. I’ve muted the rooms for teams like Development and Customer Service, because I don’t need to know when they have unread messages in them, and I don’t need to “inbox zero” them all day by popping my head inside every time they turn bold.
Mute most of your channels, and Slack will feel like a totally different tool. (Not to mention a less disruptive one!)
Slack doesn’t have to drive you crazy
Even though some people swear by ditching it altogether to avoid the constant interruptions, you don’t have to trade one extreme for another. If you try out my system for Slack, I’d love to hear how it worked for you in the comments.
