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You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Personally, I simply scan for messages addressed to me with an @mention or @channel. If there's no

You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Personally, I simply scan for messages addressed to me with an @mention or @channel. If there's no @mention, I load the channel, press the escape key and go on with my day.

lelandbatey 8y ago
Indeed, the only thing I actively watch are direct messages, everything else I check periodically through the "unread messages" area at the top with a quick "mark all as read".
- bussierem 8y ago
  For you and your parent comment: Shift+Esc will mark _all_ messages as read - no need to waste time going to each channel that has new messages!
squiggleblaz 8y ago
yeah the way to use slack (for distributed teams) is the same as the way you use the water cooler (for office-based teams). you only hear what you're there to hear. if someone put an audio recorder at your office cooler you'd never listen to the recording. however, i think that's their entire point. it's actually not very useful for actual topical discussions
- ehnto 8y ago
  It depends on the work place, but for the agency I used to work at you would be working on a particular client's project on any given day and therefore you only needed to tune into one channel. But more than that, any decisions or discussions particular to a task happened in the ticket for that task, not in slack. Slack was used for short periods of quick deliberation and problem solving environments or configuration, or general state of the project type conversations. In other words if it didn't fit in a ticket it went into slack. That worked really well for isolating slack communication to silos of attention and it solved the problem of information important to a task living in slack. Ultimately it's not the tools fault for any of this though. It's just a bunch of chat channels. It's up to you and your company to form good policies and practices.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Maybe that would be a compelling idea: have a channel-level chat for those ephemeral conversations, where the messages disappear after a certain number of minutes/hours/days/messages (maybe configured per-channel), and then have named topics within the channels for more persistent/ongoing conversations. Maybe Zulip already does that. Haven't tried it yet.
spookthesunset 8y ago
> You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Nope. But you sure as hell search it.... comes in handy to see if something has been discussed before.

lelandbatey 8y ago

Indeed, the only thing I actively watch are direct messages, everything else I check periodically through the "unread messages" area at the top with a quick "mark all as read".

bussierem 8y ago
For you and your parent comment: Shift+Esc will mark _all_ messages as read - no need to waste time going to each channel that has new messages!

squiggleblaz 8y ago

yeah the way to use slack (for distributed teams) is the same as the way you use the water cooler (for office-based teams). you only hear what you're there to hear. if someone put an audio recorder at your office cooler you'd never listen to the recording. however, i think that's their entire point. it's actually not very useful for actual topical discussions

ehnto 8y ago
It depends on the work place, but for the agency I used to work at you would be working on a particular client's project on any given day and therefore you only needed to tune into one channel. But more than that, any decisions or discussions particular to a task happened in the ticket for that task, not in slack. Slack was used for short periods of quick deliberation and problem solving environments or configuration, or general state of the project type conversations. In other words if it didn't fit in a ticket it went into slack. That worked really well for isolating slack communication to silos of attention and it solved the problem of information important to a task living in slack. Ultimately it's not the tools fault for any of this though. It's just a bunch of chat channels. It's up to you and your company to form good policies and practices.
yellowapple 8y ago
Maybe that would be a compelling idea: have a channel-level chat for those ephemeral conversations, where the messages disappear after a certain number of minutes/hours/days/messages (maybe configured per-channel), and then have named topics within the channels for more persistent/ongoing conversations. Maybe Zulip already does that. Haven't tried it yet.

spookthesunset 8y ago

> You do not need to read your entire slack channel history. Nope. But you sure as hell search it.... comes in handy to see if something has been discussed before.