Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What" | Hacker News Reader

Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What"

aggressivelyparaphrasing.me

108 pointstodsacerdoti58 comments

Why can't slack let me do something in between muting a channel or notifying me of every new message? Like, perhaps for some channels I want to read every message, but it's not time critical, so it would be nice if it only became "unread" once a day if it has new messages since last time.

Notify on start of new thread or @mention is the sweet spot.

But there are always people who insist on having their entire conversation at the top level of the channel rather than in a thread, so everybody gets notified for every message (unless they mute the whole channel).

/me shakes fist at cloud that looks like the face of a past team lead

That doesn’t generate notifications by default. It does bold the channel though.

this is the sort of thing i want AI to be solving for me. i don't need it generating hyper-realistic videos, but when those two people in my office who never thread their messages start having a conversation in #general, i want slack to automatically thread it.

Now I am wondering how difficult this would be to implement. You could extend the idea to connect multiple threads (intentional or virtual) across channels. E.g: <see all 25 other discussions on this topic>.

what's the point of it being a channel if everything should be in a thread?

just make every thread a channel, and "channel" should be a folder

#customer-incident-channel

Lbotos: okay @jane you are leading expert on problem y. Use this thread for your debugging until next sync

Lbotos: @phil your up for rebooting all the hosts. Ack this message and thread your work here. Please get started ASAP.

Lbotos: others, is there anything else that we need to get unblocked?

—-

By having one channel you can leave that open and can be up to speed on the overarching state easily. Otherwise, if I'm making subchannels I gotta make sure to invite everyone to the sub channel or switch to the “meta coordination channel” to get unplanned collaboration.

Threads have value.

It occurs to me that channels are just topics and it’s somewhat limiting to have a thread only belong to a single channel.

On the surface that sounds reasonable, but when you consider that subscribers and settings (notifications, security, privacy, search, archival…) have to be managed per channel rather than per “folder”, it quickly becomes unmanageable.

And if it’s as it sounds and you are one of the people who always has full conversations in the root of a channel where other people use threads, please reconsider.

Threads are short lived with 2-100 messages. Like a topic or an email conversation.

In email analogy - you want dedicated mailbox for every conversation? Nonsense.

in forum analogy - I want you to make a subforum (category) instead of complaining "why people talk in topic that in no way indicates it's for creating topics"

for me the sweet spot would be toggle on / off / delay X #of minutes for mentions, replies, all the things (each thing individually)..

this way some channels I would set to notify of all the things once every 2 hours, unless @mentioned

Some channels would be once every 4 hours.

Had one person who would send multiple messages in the top level

Per.

Sentence

Disable notifications for the channel and use the Unreads tab (or “Catch Up” I believe it is now called)

This was a game changer for me. The Unreads tab became a bit like email. I'd check it out a few times a day and respond where needed. Greatly cut down on the amount of distraction-by-noise I suffered in a day.

I still find it utterly mind-boggling that Slack still lacks the ability to batch or "debounce" notifications.

I don't need (nor want) to react instantaneously to anything and everything that occurs in a channel, thread, or direct-message chat... and especially not for that one senior co-worker who submits each discrete sentence in their indefinitely long stream of consciousness.

"Mute" is not an answer, because I do need to be notified of activity... But I'd rather get a single minute-delayed "boop" about multiple events than a stream of instant and sporadic mad chittering.

Or at least give us the discord feature of "Mute channel for ..." with some fixed set of durations.

I have literally thrown my apple watch on the floor due to slack notifications buzzing my wrist incessantly. It’s a trigger for me at this point.

For Zoom Team Chat you can set up notifications to only notify for replies to your messages, direct messages, and explicit mentions. I agree that it would be useful to additionally batch notifications for specific channels though.

You mean like… email?

No. I mean like what I wrote. Some channels or discussions I want to partake in live and get notifications when things are happening, some I just want to know has happened and read after.

It could be useful to let an LLM create a daily digest of those channels, then you can go read the actual messages if that seems necessary.

I have channels that I ignore and read ~once a day but there's often still not a great signal to noise ratio. Something more detailed than "x new messages" would be helpful.

I disable notifications on stuff like this. I don't want to get interrupted by random notifications every few minutes/seconds. The vast majority of slack messages are not worth being interrupted for. The very few messages that are an exception to this are a small sacrifice. I got in the habit of scanning the slack UI every once in a while to see if anything needs my attention. So, I pull notifications rather than getting them pushed to me. I check less often when I'm busy.

I find that if you don't respond in real time people around you adapt to that. If you always respond instantly, it lowers the barrier for them to bother you more. So, you'll be dealing with them constantly. If you simply delay your response, they'll adapt and be less likely to interrupt you.

I have a bunch of groups from top to bottom:

   - Channels incidents I'm in right now
   - Incidents others are working on. Our Team channel we'll be called out
   - Channels for my team
   - Other monitoring and alert channels to keep an eye on 
   - Announcements from my group, diversion, etc
   - Ongoing Issues. Incident investigation
   - Ongoing Projects
   - Issues from earlier this month (move for the top two group once resolved)
   - 3 groups of issues from 3 previous months
   - Other teams public channels I read when I have time
   - Some random internal channels
   - Other teams channels I ignore but need to join sometimes to ask their help

I'm in an ops team so probably add 5-10 channels per day for new incidents I'm on or others in my team are on.

Slack is dismantling what I've spent decades honing my email filters for and there's no analogue.

I'd sort of roughly approached this technique with my own channel organization over time without thinking about it systematically, but this is a helpful crystallization of what I'd been trying to achieve. I'm glad this was posted.

Definitely agree with others that Slack needs a richer selection of notification mechanisms, both for new content in channels and for mentions. For mentions, there's no level between "I demand immediate attention from this person" and "the characters that make up this person's name happen to be in the text of my message."

I organize mine by SCP object class. Safe is anything I can ingore, Euclid is anything I should keep an eye on. If a message means something broke down and requires immediate attention, that's Keter. (If I'm posting that something broke down, then that's Thaumiel.)

I do something similar to the OP, but there's an additional critical hack - you have to sort your Unreads view (cmd-shift-A) by the order of the channels in your groups, which is not the default setting. Then, when you you hit cmd-shift-A, you pay close attention to the initial messages from the channels close to the top (i.e. the stuff that requires your immediate attention) before hitting Escape to mark them read. Eventually the Unreads view starts to show you bullshit that you don't really need to pay attention to, and you can basically spam the Escape key to mark everything read, after maybe skimming it slightly so you see there wasn't anything of interest. Also, be pretty aggressive about muting support channels where you're not among the group of people expected to provide support.

This makes Inbox Zero in Slack easy and I don't understand why it's so difficult for other people to do it.

(currently working in a Fortune 500 with membership in probably thousands of channels, only maybe 20-30 of which are actually relevant to my daily work).

Nice. I didn't even know the Unreads view could be sorted. Also, Shift + Esc marks all as read.

I've arrived at this organisation method on a number of platforms, essentially sorting contacts into a set of priority lists, usually just three: high, medium, low, or A/B/C, whatevs.

I'll often also pin a specific search term of interest for a topic I'm following for the moment, but don't plan on subscribing to.

Most of the time my streams are then the A & B lists plus a topic of interest. Very rarely more than that. If anything vital turns up I'll generally see it one way or another. Every so often (a few times a week/month/year) I'll glance at the lower-priority lists.

I've also made a point of putting highly-voluble sources in their own channel, and then ... ignoring that. This keeps them from dominating other streams, their good stuff (usually infrequent) tends to show up elsewhere through re-shares, and my own QoL is generally improved.

Whenever the experience starts to get too annoying, I start pruning from my high-priority lists. Less is more. No news is good news.

My current slack channel organization:

- Channels I care about: ones where real work gets done every day, eg my team channels, other people I interact with frequently and directly.

- Temporarily important: short lived channels, or project channels that aren't as frequently actionable as the first category. Eg, I am struggling with some build issue so I join the public channel for the team that owns that process until I resolve my issue.

- Channels I need to follow: I don't really care too much about this, but partners or stakeholders are in them and sometimes say things I should know about or ping me or will add me if I leave, so I need to somewhat monitor it.

- Channels not really about me: Broad-based channels about company strategy, etc. In theory I guess they impact me since its about what the org, or my part of it, is up to, but tbh it doesn't actually impact me materially.

- Channels I may leave soon. Basically recycle bin, before I leave channel entirely.

Huh, I never thought of it that way but we sort of have that, just that it's two entries instead of a whole list of frequencies. There's a general chat that you can read whenever~never (participate as much as you want), and one that you are supposed to read (also after a holiday, you're meant to read what was announced). Taking a peek every now and then throughout the day is fine (most days there's 0-2 messages in it). It's basically email whereas the other chat is 'chat'

And of course, if someone needs you specifically, they'll @mention or PM you

Not sure why you would need a four-tiered scheme of frequencies for this

How big is your company? We have ~800 people and after about two years I’m in close to 200 channels. I don’t leave them because then I won’t be able to find messages in search for the private channels. I just throw everything into a “stale” category at the bottom of the sidebar every few months.

They're all private? Why are you guys doing that?

A good number of them are. I don’t like it either. I make every new channel public.

So stupid. I could possibly see it in a giant corporation where security could be more of an issue, but at 800 people?

There’s plenty of legitimate security concerns. But that’s not the usual reason for private channels. They’re created by people with control issues. It’s just another gatekeeping mechanism and way of playing politics.

We get security alerts when we set a channel to public. We also have 1 day retention for private chats. (Teams, not Slack, but same idea)

A 1 day retention? That seems suspiciously short and like it is intended to cover things up

Yes, it's absurd. But our industry put heavy incentive on R&D DLP.

Where I am, you need an admin to make a public channel; you cannot do it yourself.

Same, private channel search privilege.

Most channels should not be public but when people have fear, it is private by default, and when they have safety it is public by default.

There should be a way to leave a private channel but rejoin it at any time, so that it’s included in search results.

But then again that’s solving a problem that shouldn’t exist if there is no performance penalty from joining many channels. It doesn’t seem like there is, either. I haven’t had an issue just hiding everything under the “Stale” category.

I don't want to organize ... I just want a filter on the channel sidebar!

I wish Slack would let me pop out multiple windows or channels.

Every morning I go in, get half a dozen inquiries left from people who are in earlier time zones, and have to like write "..." in a reply, because then you can at least find them in "drafts" instead of having them disappear.

I use Teams but I usually just leave on read as a signal to get to it later when I have time. I have notifs muted. But I'm also not pinged so often that I need tactics like this article. Good stuff.

It's "unread", not "on read" by the way. I would not normally mention this type of correction, but I've noticed it more frequently and the two phrases are antonyms, unlike the common "lose"/ "loose" mistake.

I'm surprised people are still using work chat like this.

My workplace switched to Teams about 5 years ago. The app is of course janky and slow, but it had the side effect of pushing all the important conversations to emails and scheduled meetings.

Teams integrates with Outlook well enough that I never have to second guess my schedule and all the chatter is now just DMs, informal group chats that I would actually care about, and a bunch of broader group channels that nobody is expected to look at very often (not even every day).

I rarely feel distracted by chat anymore unless it makes sense because something is actually on fire.

Naturally gravitated to this somewhat over the course of the past six months, but this nails down exactly how I want to approach channel structure.

Even with OP's kind of sorting, office chat products conceal the priority of any given message to trick you into more participation. The "purpose of a system is what it does" style thinking can get carried away, but more than 99% of the messages in places I will be expected to notice things that require same day attention, don't. The goal is to waste my time.

I rarely have >3 unscheduled conversations in a day that couldn't wait until tomorrow morning. They just never come from the same place.

It's a yappers paradise. They wouldn't include me on an email where they deliberately have to pick participants, but think the serendipity will occur down the road justifies forcefeeding me whatever bullshit they're working on just in case.

I think this has gotten worse with time. In the early days back when Slack still had a barely modified standard chat UI, it wasn’t nearly as much of a problem. Most of the UI changes made since then have been “solutions” to problems caused by their other changes.

I’d love to have original the origins design back.

This is the problem with everything being 'chat'.

It's not designed for having single-concern conversation or managing priority or intent. It's there for call-reply.

We switched to cushion.so which is async. We use posts, pretty much like a post here, for most conversations. It uses a message board-like approach where it makes sense. You don't need to be pinged constantly for everything. Especially when theres 10 people all discussing the same thing that might not be a priority for you right now.

Then you can just use chat for direct high shit-is-on-fire messaging.

Problem is Slack is designed to get to you to constantly chat, chat, chat. So that's what you end up doing.

Made our lives 10x easier.

Feature request:

Disable multi-DMs

If you need to message multiple people, it goes in a public/private channel (existing or new)

“Where did the 2 of you want to go to grab lunch today?”

goes unread for 2 hours

Slack was created by Silicon Valley insiders and enjoyed a smooth rise to fame and prominence, so it has led me to ask for years, is it a project of the Church of Subgenius?

Of course, prominent Subgenius adherents may not tend to acknowledge their "faith" outside of pseudonym-based posting on Usenet or other media, but the intersection of irreligious techies working on a project/company named for their central tenet seems too much coincidence to be an accident.

If Slack's chat service sort of destroys productivity and ruins workplace hierarchies and relationships by design, it seems that it is achieving the goals of the formerly "parody religion" and introducing more "Slack" to the world in the process. Mission accomplished, Bob?

And in among the silence, we receive affirmation.

It definitely depends on the nature of your work, but the notion of having a channel I need to check hourly makes me ill. If I’m needed I should get a notification, and if I’m involved in an active discussion, I’m there. Otherwise I’ll catch up on a daily basis.

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