You asked: What is the the right way to use Slack?

Hello friends,

First off, thanks for all the questions you sent in for our interview with Cal. It was so fun hearing what was on your mind.

Second, thank you for the corrections and for schooling us on your expectations of a podcast transcript. We'll hire someone else to do it next time 😅

A friendly tip from John O'Nolan. You know, John, I'm a programmer not a podcaster.

Finally, it appears the Soundcloud embed of the audio recording didn't show up in many people's email clients, and that many of you didn't realize it was recorded! Well it was, and it's quite nice to listen to. There's music and everything.

If you missed it the first time around, here it is again:

And since that embed might get eaten, you can just follow this link: https://soundcloud.com/johnnyrodgers/cal-henderson-interview-2025.

Today we have a brief You asked post. This is where we answer questions you send us at buildingslack@gmail.com.

Phillip Sims wants to know:

I have a question I’d love to ask any of the Slack OGs, in response to Cal mentioning the frustration of seeing someone in a coffee shop “use Slack the wrong way.”

What is the the right way to use Slack? Can you give us the pro tips and best practices? I have to say, I have a love/hate feeling toward Slack - it sometimes feels like it magnifies poor workplace communication or maybe it’s just bad if you don’t use it as designed. Has it just been bastardized as the everything workplace tool? I often feel overwhelmed with the noise and volume of messages I need to keep up with.

Thank you for the question, Phillip. This is a big gnarly one. Frankly, we were working to answer this question for the entirety of the time we worked on Slack. And I'm sure those working on it today are still faced with the same challenges.

I'd like to answer in two ways: 1) some practical recommendations from my own experience and 2) how we approached this issue as designers of Slack.

Some recommendations

There is no one right way to use Slack. Your role, team culture, company size and industry vertical will all have a huge influence on what will work for you. But here are some general rules that seem to work.

Work in public. Slack is built around public channels. Most conversations can and should happen in public, rather than in DMs or private channels. Public channel messages enrich the organizational knowledge of the whole company, are available to anyone via search, and attract the broadest set of input and answers. In the early years of our Slack team, more than 90% of our messages were in public, with private ones only used for ephemeral DM chatter and sensitive topics like hiring and compensation.

Only use Slack. We knew from the beginning that if Slack was "one more place to check" then it would fail. It is most useful when it is the primary tool your team uses for internal communication. Shift internal email lists to channels. Shift messengers to DMs. Plug all your data sources from your business and company systems into channels via the API and platform tools. This was how Slack the company used Slack the product and is a key to getting the most out of it.

Search and then ask. Assuming the above are true, your Slack archive becomes a vast knowledge base. Search works well. Chances are (at least at bigger companies or older Slack teams) that someone has shared information relevant to your question before. Use search to find it, or to find what channel to ask in, then ask.

You don't need to read everything. Many people get overwhelmed trying to keep up with everything, or get stuck in a loop of reading and replying to all conversations in real time without making space for focused work. Instead, star and keep up with the core channels most relevant to your work and team. You can skim others when you have down time, or mute them to stop them from being marked unread in your sidebar. Or just leave them! Shift-esc to mark everything as read if you want to reset 💥

Thread appropriately. If you're in a low volume channel or group DM, most messages should just go in the main conversation. If you're in a higher volume channel, or need to discuss a tangent to the main topic, reply in a thread. This makes conversations easier to follow.

Use reactions. Reactions are fun, but they're also amazingly useful.

• Show the state of something:
  • 👀 for attention
  • ✅ for complete
  • ❓for question
• Categorize a triage channel:
  • ⚪ for low priority
  • 🔵 for medium
  • 🔴 for high
• Quickly poll:
  • 👍
  • 👎

In the teams I've been a part of since leaving the company, I see reactions drastically underused for these quick ways to move work along. For more sophisticated workflows, the Reacji Channeler is magic.

Use shortcuts. I wrote a long twitter thread ages ago with a bunch of shortcuts and similar tips: https://x.com/johnnyrodgersis/status/1458144306884083713. At the very least these will help you get around Slack more quickly and tailor it to your liking.

Use Later. We built Later out of two early features that were a little half-baked: starred messages and reminders. With Later you can have a personal list of the things you need to follow up on, with optional reminders. My personal workflow at Slack was to skim channels, bookmarking items that needed a response or action, and replying to urgent stuff. Then when I was caught up and ready to dig in, I would just work through my Later list.

Use Huddles. If a conversation in channel is getting busy and has a lot of attention, it might be faster to switch a huddle on and talk it through live. Huddles have the character of a quick hallway conversation or coffee chat, and can save time and improve understanding accordingly. With my colleagues I found we could often talk something out on a spontaneous huddle and save the time that would have been spent on writing it out or waiting for a meeting.

Our design intentions

The tips above should help you and your team use Slack better. But I also wanted to address the meat of your question:

I have a love/hate feeling toward Slack - it sometimes feels like it magnifies poor workplace communication or maybe it’s just bad if you don’t use it as designed. Has it just been bastardized as the everything workplace tool? I often feel overwhelmed with the noise and volume of messages I need to keep up with.

The downsides of always-on company communication in your pocket and on your screen are many. Some of these we strove to address with features at the individual level for things like presence, timezone indicators, status, and granular notification preferences. Others with tools like scheduled send, canvases for persistent information, and features like Catch Up on mobile to quickly triage your unreads. We always optimized for good defaults and individual control, and intentionally did not optimize for "engagement" metrics. Nevertheless, we ourselves felt the pull of realtime discussion over focused work, and the resulting feeling of anxiety and overwhelm that you mention.

At the organizational level, we often saw companies recreate the siloing of conversations by enforcing the use of private workspaces and private channels, thereby fragmenting their archives. We also saw certain industries and customers crank up retention policies so the archive was constantly deleted. We heard about abuse of presence indicators and do not disturb hours for punitive surveillance of employees. Needless to say this was not our intention when we designed these features.

Workplace chat encourages more communication in a way that felt natural to our small initial group, but it also assumes a quality of communication that isn't always to be had. Slack also arrived into a world being reshaped by social media and smartphones, both of which are mutating attention to prioritize short cycles and constant stimulation. The ongoing tensions around remote work and the ambiguous norms of a digital workplace have further muddied expectations.

The aspirational goal of Slack is to help our customers achieve organizational transformation. We wanted to improve the visibility and accessibility of company communication. To reduce the overhead of sharing that information. To make better decisions with more input from a broader set of stakeholders. To make “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.” To flatten organizations so the new intern could gather as much context as the CEO, and even ask her a question.

For those coming from the world of email and weekly meetings and hierarchical silos of information in the early 2010s, many of these outcomes of using Slack were transformative. I believe in all that stuff, and I think the broad adoption of Slack and tools like it since then is testimony to its validity as a thesis. I certainly don't want to go back to an email office. But we – software designers, company leaders, and society as a whole – still have a lot to figure out.