The most common complaint I hear from people when I tell them I work at Slack is something along the lines of “It’s great, but I get super distracted and overwhelmed by it.”
I get it. I was in the same boat: I’d just keep cycling through channels for no particular reason when I felt like procrastinating, only to eventually look at the time and realize an hour had gone by.
While this still happens to me sometimes, after almost a couple of years using Slack for absolutely all of my communications every day and looking at how people inside Slack use Slack, I put together my own system to manage and process Slack messages. Yes, I haven’t sent a single work email in almost two years, and I am beyond grateful. Slack is a much better way to communicate — you just need to tame it. I’ll show you how I did it.
Slack Is Your Inbox
I think of Slack as the inbox where I collect inputs related to my work, and my goal is to process those inputs to reach Inbox Zero every day (more on this toward the end).
The inputs are messages. These messages will be, for the most part, sent by your…