Using the slack the better way. Part 2
Maintaining the action items inside slack and using slack as mini project management tool.
Finally got time to ship the long pending part 2 of this blog series.
Now that we have handled the distractions in Slack, now we will need some way to organise our action items inside Slack.
Among the high performing teams where lots of messages shoots from many directions. In such environment, making sense among all messages and keeping yourself sane while using slack is a matter of necessity for every manager. I learned this the hard way and want to share this to other new-coming managers and others who are overwhelmed from slack messages.
Earlier, when I come back after a personal time off day, I will get 9+ threads that I will be tagged in. Nowadays, if I’m away for 2 hours, I’m getting the 9+ tagged messages. Does this mean I will always have to be in slack. Absolutely NO.
Action items
I skim through the ‘Mentions & reactions’ tab time to time. Some will be just updates where you can simply acknowledge and move on. Some of them will be just ‘good to know’ information. Some of the messages will be tasks/asks on me.
If those tasks on me could be achieved under 5 minutes and I have time to achieve them immediately. I would do it immediately and move on. For these minor ad-hoc tasks which completed in under 5 minutes immediately, using dedicated project management is overkill in my current state of opinion.
If I’m in between my focus time and came to slack only to see if there is any fire but got distracted now because of the action items. I would acknowledge the message with an emoji/reply and save the action items to finish those later.
For the tasks, that cannot be done immediately, I would recommend that the a dedicated project management tool is the best way. Majorly because Slack is not built that way to follow up and keep track of major or scheduled tasks as easily. If you are not ready to go out of Slack, then setting up a reminder for the messages would be a little easier way. You can also set multiple reminders about the same message.
Keywords in Meeting notes
Meeting notes is one of the important source of information in many projects across the organisation.
In the meeting notes,
some points would be action items on me,
some points would be the decisions we made,
some would be action items on others,
some would be action items for a later point of time and so on.
I’m sure all teams would use @mentions in Slack profusely. If not, it is important to use @mentions as much for the ask/assign a task to someone. This helps others to be sure of the ask and not leave room for any assumptions in the communication.
For the decisions to make, I just add a decision: prefix. So, it will be easy for stakeholders to just skim and understand more clearly. And easily searchable later when much needed.
I also add other keywords, like meeting notes:, questions:, reason , etc. Keywords are the simba. 😛
Stealth work
When I work on weekends occasionally and would want others to know, I use Draft messages or Scheduled messages. This is to make sure I don’t encourage others to work on weekends.
This is the tl;dr for the workflow of my slack usage.
Things looks much simpler now to use Slack for the best of my productivity.