How do I get better at using Slack?

Matthew Haughey

Feb 20, 2024 • 10 min read

I spent nearly 7 years working at Slack on a variety of marketing projects, but eventually I honed in on writing about customer education, hoping to answer the most popular question I got regularly, which was "How should I be using Slack? And how can I get better at using Slack?"

I did my best to answer that question in every post I wrote on the Slack blog, but we never had a perfect landing page to serve as a one-stop shop for it. A friend recently asked me how to get people excited to use Slack at their new job, because they'd worked at Slack and saw how great it was when it was used by everyone at a high level.

A curated list of articles on how to get better at using Slack

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any one document to share with people wanting to learn how to use Slack from their first day as well as learning how to be a better person inside of Slack. For my friend's request, I went through hundreds of my old posts on the Slack site and grouped what I thought were the most helpful.

Getting up to speed using Slack for the first time

These are a bunch of posts about onboarding, or what you do when you first join a Slack team. For those new to Slack, the hardest thing to get at first is what a channel is, what it does, and why you use them. A close second is how to think about public (to your whole company) and private (to a small group), and why it's a good idea to default to public when you can (most people instinctively go private on everything).

Here are series of posts on how we onboard new employees at Slack and get them comfortable with how the company uses it.

These two are geared toward those just starting out fresh, but also if you've been tossed into a project already in progress.

And finally, here's a post explaining the philosophy behind what a #channel is, why you'd start a new one, what you'd use them for, and it generally explains why Slack is organized primarily around them.

Etiquette tips in Slack

A popular topic among customers I interviewed and from the stats behind the Slack blog was everyone wanted tips on etiquette, or how they should use Slack and how others could best interact on the app.

Here are some posts specifically about this.

This last one focuses on etiquette when you're in a company Slack with 1,000 or more people, because being on a large team means often tweaking your behavior to cut down on noise/interruptions for everyone.

Where was I in Slack? How do I do x in Slack?

My favorite way to help my coworkers and readers of the Slack blog was to answer a question I asked myself several times a day, which was "How do I find that thing I was just chatting about in Slack?!" This list also touches on intermediate and advanced topics and features, and how to streamline how you use Slack even if you've been using it for years.

Approvals, workflows, doing more than just chat in Slack

A big part of what we did day-to-day at Slack was automate/streamline project approvals to get our work done faster. To be honest, Slack doesn't scream out these features when you first start using it, so you kind of have to dig pretty deep to find Workflow Builder (or even know what you'd use Workflow Builder for).

(this one explains what the Reacji Channeler does)

Internal Comms-specific tips

Before I joined Slack, I had no idea what an Internal Communications team did at a startup, but I crossed paths with the team so often I ended up interviewing them dozens of times to hear how that team uses Slack. Here are a bunch of posts about this specific team inside most large companies.

If you search the Slack blog, you're likely to find posts about other teams at Slack we focused on, like how Engineering teams use it and how Customer Service adopts it.

I hope this helps anyone who has to use/endure Slack in their company, and if you've got any unanswered questions about Slack, feel free to drop a comment here and I'll do my best to answer.

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A longstanding project I've wanted to do since I left Slack was write a short (probably free/cheap) eBook on how to use Slack more effectively. It would be skewed towards how to deal with the (sometimes loud, sometimes constant) interruptions from Slack, how to keep it at arm's length when you need to, and how to be on your best behavior in it (with the hopes your coworkers follow suit). It'd be more of a strategy guide that admits the limitations and downsides of badly used Slack, point to ways to use it wisely, and act as a guide to surviving having to use it in a large team.

If this sounds interesting, let me know in a comment below!