Over the past month or two, I've talked to many of you and done my own research on what best practices for Slack might look like for our organization.

Here's what I think is a winning strategy, drawing on tidbits from David, Andreas, and plenty others of you all. These principles will help us keep making sense of our rapidly evolving workspace.

-@Rishi Tripathy

Principles

• Why are we doing this? The risks of unhygienic Slack usage: overwhelm, desensitization to important context, FOMO, paralysis. No bueno 👎🏽. The upside of efficient, disciplined Slack usage: streamlined communication, fast decisions, discoverable context 😋.
• Slack is for discussion, not documentation. Coming soon: a similar guide for Notion ;)
• It is OK (and encouraged!) to miss things in Slack of your immediate day-to-day workstreams.

Behaviors

🧵 Thread it. Use threads like a crazy person - it should be ridiculously easy to discover, digest, and contribute to a discussion. Vertical real estate in a channel is sacred - always toss expanding links in threads, and delete previews in main thread unless mission-critical. Mute a thread that's no longer relevant to you.

• If you're about to post something longer than 2-3 lines, 🛑 STOP and ask yourself why. Truncate your message after the first sentence and add the rest to the thread.
• Same goes for links, images. if it’s going to take up more than a few lines of screen real estate, thread it. Auto expanding links are the death of slack efficiency.

⚾ Get outta here! Aim to leave or archive ~70% of your channels, leaving essential channels only. Then, mute ~70% of what remains. #-g-team-updates and All Hands will keep you in the loop on what's going on. Settings are now such that in most cases, no message is sent to the channel when someone leaves a channel. Leave at will, and don't feel bad about it!! 🤩 🍂

Best way to leave channels: Right click and work your way down the sidebar. 💨 Poof!

Example: there's no reason there should be 40+ people in the #program-directors channel. If you need to get their attention, you can use @pd anywhere.

• We're making major efforts (#team-updates is a start, All Hands is another example, working on a "Slack Digest" of sorts) that you can still be "in the loop" without having your sidebar blowing up - Context Over Control.

• Use "User Groups" to mention people relevant to a discussion, but always bias towards "Let them know" over "Add them" to let people retain agency over which channels they join.

  

• It should be common and the default to *not *****be in a channel, be tagged in to address something (using the "Let them know" option), and then leave again.

• 🗣 State your intentions when adding feedback. Especially when you're 'popping in' to drop a thought, your words can have unintended weight (especially if you're a manager). Preface suggestions with their weight, like #driveby or #idea to be explicit about what impact you intend to them have (details in toggle).

  • Feedback Intentions (with examples)

Expectations

• 🤏🏽 Nudge, nicely. It is never a bad thing to nudge someone to follow these principles — i.e. replying to a massive message clogging up a channel and saying "Hey this probably should have been a thread, can you update?" (it's super easy to copy-paste and update).

To quote our operating principles: **"I will do this for each of you, and expect the same of you for me."**

• 🧘🏽‍♂️🌪🧠 Take the Calm before the Brainstorm. Slack is powerful because you can get information and feedback to/from everyone, instantly. However, with great power comes great responsibility 🕷.

Before spinning up an #idea thread about something, consider: - Searching in #g-brainstorming and #g-i-have-an-idea to see if the topic has already been addressed - Adding more context or jotting down a quick proposal in a Notion doc so that people can review and give feedback thoughtfully as well! Key components: - Who will make the decision - Who is affected - On what timeline - Ask yourself who should be involved and share it within the appropriate context. (e.g. if it's purely an ODF-brainstorm, maybe odf-general instead of #-g-brainstorming)

We love the ability for our org structure to facilitate spontaneous ideas — as we grow, it's important we do this responsibly. Don't forget about [Nelly](<https://odteam.notion.site/Remoji-Dictionary-b63db8835bbf4120936d01c50eb7eedd>) when you spin one up!

*In progress - a way to collect and track where various ideas are going / which have been addressed.*

Remoji

Emoji Reactions (remoji) are a huge part of the Slack experience. We can use these to scale our communication bandwidth. Here's a start - we can build up a lexicon as time goes on:

Remoji Dictionary

Pro Tips

Use these to supercharge your Slack usage! These are all Rishi-Approved™️ productivity hacks.