As with all written communication, you should consider the reader when writing slack messages. The better your message, the more effective your communication will be and the easier it will be for others to interact with.
The Basics
To use slack considerately and effectively, stick to these guidelines:
- Send whole messages. Sending a single thought as many separate messages makes it hard to use threads and emoji reactions, and hard to share or refer to the message later. So write your whole message before pressing enter. (If you need line breaks, use Alt + Enter)
- Use formatting to aid communication. Slack supports italics, bold,
strikethroughandcodeformatting. Learn how this works and use it - it'll help others understand your message quicker.
- Use Links not URLs. If you select a word in slack and paste a URL over it, the text will become a link. This is much better than just pasting long, ugly URLs everywhere.
- Edit, don't asterisk. If you have a typo, don't send another message as a correction* - edit the original message.
- Use emoji for simple signals. If you’re asking people to do something, ask them in the message to put a ✅ on it. If you need people to vote, put 👍👎 reactions on and ask them to click one. Make their job easy.
- Tag people. If you mention someone by name, tag them in with an @mention so they can join the conversation.
Writing a great message
Try to make life easy for both you and the folks reading your message. Look at this message…
What’s going on here?
- Posted in a public channel, with some people tagged. This means others can see it but only those who need to take action are notified.
- Deadline for action clearly shown, including timezone and actual date. If I just said "tomorrow" people would have to check the date/time I sent the message and know my timezone to work out what "tomorrow" meant. Save them the effort.
- My requests are clear - there's very little ambiguity. I also link directly to the other resources they need.
- The video task shows how long it is (7:40). This saves folks opening the link, waiting for it to load and realising they don't have time to watch it right now.
- I explicitly ask folks to acknowledge receipt by reacting to the message. This way we all know who has seen the message. (I could also have asked people to drop a âś… reaction when they're done with the tasks)
This stuff isn't complicated, but it makes a huge difference if everyone thinks like this when communicating asynchronously. Here are a few more tips…
Use one message per topic
When sharing multiple topics & thoughts, send a separate message for each. this makes it much easier to react and thread under each thought, and it’s easier to share, search for or reference the individual messages later on.
Similarly, it’s sometimes a good idea to split bulleted lists into multiple messages…
Edit your messages
If you need to edit a message that’s already been read by people, consider making that clear in your edit…