Blog • August 2020 How being Slack has made us more productive.

There’s no doubt that email has revolutionised the way we do business and connect with clients, suppliers, colleagues, and of course, click frenzy deals. But do you ever get that awful, sinking feeling when you open your mail to see the progress bar and tally of new messages being downloaded? It’s a digital assault and quite frankly, I kinda know how the Dursleys feel when thousands of Harry’s acceptance letters to Hogwarts fly through every opening of their house!  

And then there’s the triage process. What can be deleted (don’t worry, you can look at the latest online sales from your trash folder later), what is just for my information and doesn’t need responding to, and what requires attention, and how quickly? Yikes, I need a coffee or I might just hide under the stairs.

Contributing to the volume of messages clogging our inbox was our daily office conversation... and we talk A LOT. Phone messages, reminders, ideas, work priorities, “We need more toilet paper”, and “Who is going out for lunch?”. Then when EVERYONE is in on the email and EVERYONE replies, the trail quickly gets out of control and can bury other important messages in the blink of an eye. 

That is until we discovered Slack in 2014. A handy platform that takes office conversation off email and into its own hub, organised into channels. Make a channel for anything! Name it by topic, client, project, team, and if you’re like us, you’ll definitely have one for “lunch-money”. Then invite the team members the channel is relevant to and voila, you have an organised communication system that makes collaboration quick and easy. So if the team has something super important for me to read, approve, action, or laugh at, it’s there without creating congestion in my inbox. Nice! 

Slack and tools of the like are useful for external communication also. If you have regular or priority clients, a Slack channel dedicated to their needs is a great way to keep communication efficient and response times can improve dramatically - because they aren’t losing your emails in their own Dursleys letterbox scenarios!

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