Warning: Extreme sarcasm below.

You are a efficient organizer. You aspire to be the thorn on the rose bush, the seeds in the banana, or the plastic top to the deodorant. You make sure the dishes in the dishwasher are arranged correctly so you can fit in one last dish before running it. The books on your bookshelf are all in alphabetical order, and when they’re not, you notice, and you get angry. While you keep things organized, fresh, and categorized, you’ve noticed that your team’s Slack is not up to par. How can you apply this same level of organization to your Slack team?

Night Time Slacking

Install Slack on your smartphone. Make sure when people who aren’t in your timezone ask questions, that you answer them as quickly as possible. 4 am or so is an excellent time to be available. There isn’t any need to follow up with the person later — their question is as good as answered! You’re good at Slack, so no worries, your answers will be perfectly clear and understandable, even though you’re half asleep. You’ll get an accomplished feeling for being available 24/7 for your employer, even though you’re not on call. Besides, company loyalty pays dividends in the long run. Besides, it’s not like anyone else on the team is going to have to clean up after you in the morning. You got the problem solved, just like a good employee does! I bet you can smell that raise already.

Slack It To Another Channel

Sometimes conversations just aren’t relevant to the current channel topic. It’s extremely important to always be on topic. After all, Slack lets you make as many channels as you want, without limitation! You might as well have channels for each kind of conversation that you plan to have. Then, when conversations do occur between human-things, you always have a clear understanding about where they belong.

After all, you’re not in every channel in your team’s Slack for a reason! You don’t want to have your channels polluted with the chats that don’t belong. You can even create an emoji reaction convention where an emoji tells someone that they need to move their message somewhere else. If you don’t have a reaction-move-your-conversation-emoji, then you can use the one I use. It’s a bucket of paint, and it reminds me of a summer I spent painting my shed (where I store my bikes and other lawn equipment) several different colors. I like how the paint on this icon is orange, just like my echohack logo. Now there’s a conversation worth making a new Slack channel.

Preview Every Link In Slack

It’s really important that your link gets noticed by people. That’s why it’s important to make sure that link previews are always turned on. Especially if the site you’re linking to has a big logo that will fill up the entire viewport of each and every person’s Slack client. Make sure that other people’s conversations get pushed off the screen (they’re done talking anyway) so you get maximum visibility. Remember: You’re the CEO / Executive Assistant / Developer Prophet Evangelist Prognosticator, so your links matter more than everyone else’s links!

If you don’t know how to turn on link previews, you can do it like this:

1. Click your team name to open the Team Menu.

2. Choose Preferences.

3. Select the Messages & Media tab.

4. Under Inline Media & Links, check Show text previews of linked websites.

As you can see in my example above, the link preview took up almost twice as much space as the original message and the link combined! Now you’re getting visibility to your important links!

Don’t Be Embarrassed; Mute, Don’t Leave Slack Channels

You are probably in a ton of Slack channels, and they’re difficult to manage. Leaving a channel is not the way to fix this problem. When you leave a channel, Slack automatically puts an embarrassing messaging telling everyone in the channel that you’ve left (and you can’t turn it off). It’s important that you don’t get caught not being a team player and participating in every conversation. Imagine what people will think if you leave the code review channel! Or if you leave the customer communication channel! Do you not agree with code reviews? Do you think communication with customers is bad? Who do you think you are?! That’s right, you’re a goddamn maverick that sells software to enterprise companies! You’ve got a reputation to uphold! You need to avoid this potentially career-crippling embarrassment. Instead, you should mute the channel and never have to see it ever again.

Get Everyone’s Attention With @channel

Some of you might know that @here lets you message everyone in a channel, but did you know that it only messages people if they are active and online? Work is important, and it’s critical that everyone at your remote-first company pay attention to your calendar invite! It’s especially important that your employees who are screen sharing with customers get a notification on their screen every time you send secret company meeting invites! No worries, Slack enables you to interrupt everyone with @channel. Think of it as a permanent replacement for @here, or for individually @mentioning a small list of people who are within the scope of your message.

Build Immutable Groups With Slack Group Direct Messages

Everyone’s using containers these days, so why not have containers for your conversations? That’s exactly the awesome power that group direct messages give you. When you start a conversation with a group of people, it’s impossible to add new people to that conversation without destroying the previous conversation history. Now your conversations are immutable, just like your dev environment (but not like your production workloads, especially that .NET server that’s your core business app that everyone hates but is the only thing that actually earns you money). This is a really good feature because you want to make sure that new people who join your conversation can’t scroll up and read your past messages. This makes it much easier to CYA (cover your ass)!

Avoid Conversations With Slack Threaded Messages

As of this writing, threaded messages are brand new to Slack, and they’re working wonders. Let’s say you want to have an “open” conversation with people in your channel, but you want to make it difficult for most people to comment on it, especially those using the mobile client, or people who don’t use all 2560 x 1440 pixels of their 27" Apple monitor for the Slack client. When your boss asks you why your work didn’t get done, you can keenly point out that it DID get done, but that she didn’t read the 7th reply to the threaded message that happened last night at 4am. Now you’re able to avoid those uncomfortable conversations!

When All Else Fails, Make Another Channel

Sometimes one, ten, one-hundred, or even a thousand channels isn’t enough to talk to people. You need to segregate conversations into their correct homes. Just imagine that you are a biologist. It’s very important to name things specifically. That’s right: You need your own Slack taxonomy. Don’t just have a #music channel. Make sure you also have a #music-rock, #music-edm, #music-kpop, #retrowave-music, and other music channels so you can maximize the number of variety of conversations. Here’s a more concrete example. Let’s say you have a customer, let’s call them Evil_Corp. So you have a #customer_evil_corp channel right? Well, what about #evil_corp_2017, #evil_corp_sales, #renewals_evil_corp, or #evil_corp_firedrill? If you don’t have these kinds of extra channels, it shows that you’re not really taking care of your customer. Your company is a customer first organization, right? I think the fact that you don’t have at least ten evil_corp channels in your Slack team is evidence enough about why they decided to not renew the big contract with your company and went with a competitor instead. So learn from your mistakes, and get creating those channels!

Slack continues to add new features (like threaded messages) every day. I can’t wait until even more exciting ways to have conversations are unveiled! It’s so exciting I’m going to make a new channel about it in my Slack team, right now. I mean, #slack_meta is just not enough. We need #slack-future-features, #slack-hype, and #slack-releases too! What channels have you made today?