Slack Basics

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

Slack is a channel-based messaging platform. With Slack, people can work together more effectively, connect all their software tools and services and find the information that they need to do their best work.

A huge number of distributed teams use Slack as their primary messaging platform, and those that don't will inevitably use a similar tool like Microsoft Teams. As a distributed worker, it's not only important that you learn how to use Slack – it's also important that you learn how to use it like a pro. It's likely to be your primary means of communication with other people on your team.

If you've never used Slack before, here's a quick overview...

Tools like Slack make it easy for teams to communicate in the open. This is really important in distributed teams because it helps create a culture of openness and trust.

It also helps to avoid silos of knowledge and keeps everyone aware of what's going on in other parts of the company. In an office, these things are usually achieved through physical proximity and chance conversations.

Slack also brings some other advantages:

• It's inclusive by default. If we use Slack to communicate in the open, people can choose the conversations they want to join or leave.
• It's asynchronous by default.
• It fosters a sense of global community.
• It enables open and transparent knowledge sharing, and avoids duplicated work.

The Basics

The best way to learn Slack is to use it. So make sure you keep it open whenever you can. There are four ways to send messages in Slack. It's important that you understand when and how to use each of them. Lots of new Slack users default to Direct Messages (DM), but as we'll see below that's not always the best idea.

Public Channels

The majority of channels in most Slacks are public. This means that anyone can see what's posted in them and join/leave them as they please. Since we value transparency, we should generally default to communicating in the open... in public channels.

When you join a new Slack you'll automatically be added to a few public channels, but you should feel free to join others 👉

Private Channels

Private channels work just like public channels, except that they can only be joined if someone already in the channel invites you. Their purpose is to keep conversation private from the rest of the company. Most distributed companies strongly discourage the use of private channels because they keep information hidden. Having said that, certain topics need to be kept private, so you'll often find channels like #salaries, #complaints and #hr-internal are kept private.

You can't see or search for private channels to join – you have to wait until you're invited.

Direct Messages - Single Person

These work exactly how you'd expect: a direct message between you and one other person. While these can be useful for quick conversations, they have two big downsides:

• Like private channels, they hide information from the rest of the company.
• Anything discussed in a DM is private to you and the person you're talking to. There is no way to bring a third person into the conversation.

It's extremely common to have a long conversation via DM and then realize that you need someone else's opinion. The only way to bring them in is to copy/paste all the messages into a public channel. This is why it's usually best to start conversations in a public channel in the first place.

Even if you're inviting a coworker for lunch, it's usually better to do it in a public channel – it allows others to join in.

Direct Messages - Multiple People

These work exactly like single person DMs, only there are more than two of you in the conversation. they have exactly the same downsides as one-to-one DMs:

• Like private channels, they hide information from the rest of the company.
• Anything discussed in a DM is private to you and the people you're talking to.

Unlike public and private channels, they also send a notification to every participant whenever you send a message.

You should usually avoid multi-person DMs.

If you need to have a private conversation with multiple people, use a private channel. If the conversation doesn't need to be private, use a public channel.

Threads

If you've ever been in a WhatsApp group where different people are having multiple conversations at the same time, you'll understand how confusing it can get. Slack's answer to this is threads. They allow you to reply to a message without overwhelming the main channel.

This has some big advantages:

• It keeps the main channel clean, which makes it easier to scan.
• It keeps replies connected to the original message, which makes it easier to find replies later.
• It allows you to go back and comment on past messages.

Wherever possible, use threads when replying to messages.

Mentions

When you post a message in a DM, the other participant(s) will be automatically notified. However, posting in a public or private channel won't usually send a notification. This is a good thing, since we don't want to be notified of every message.

If you want to notify someone in a public or private channel, you need to @mention them. You can do this using their display name: Eg @Danny.

It's usually a good idea to tag someone in this way whenever you use their name in a message, but you can also use it to send notifications to people in threads.

There are also two special types of mention available in Slack:

• @channel - Notifies everyone in the channel whether they are active or not.
• @here - Notifies all active users in the channel.

You should be particularly careful when using @channel, since it will send a notification to everyone in the channel. In a large slack this might notify thousands of people if you use it in #general.

Your Slack Profile