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Imagine this: you sit down to work, and all of a sudden you get that first notification ding. It’s a team member looking for a resource link. So you spend five minutes sharing and responding…. a few minutes later, another ding — this time it’s just a community update that you can ignore… then an hour later, while deep in thought, more dings… so you unplug your computer and throw it at the wall.

Chances are you know how much of a Slack hater I used to be, because of the exact scene that just played out.

However, it wasn’t until I brought on my team that I realized that Slack is one of the best product tools on the market.

Shocker, I know.

But newsflash — you can’t just create a channel and hope for the best.

Since embracing the platform, I’ve adopted a handful of simple strategies that can take your Slack space to the next level whether you’re using it for business or community.

My initial introduction to Slack was community-based.

The organization I worked for utilized Google Hangouts, now known as Chats, and when I kicked off my freelancing career, I emailed clients.

Simple.

Even as time went on, as a solopreneur, I didn’t see the need to create a real-time conversation stream for the majority of my clients. But the more I got into freelancing, the more communities and courses I joined — many of which operated on Slack — in horribly different ways.

It was a free-for-all. The constant dinging and channel mentions made me not even want to participate in the space at all. So I either removed myself or muted them completely.

Then, at the beginning of this year I brought on two assistants at my agency, _systms™, and at the same time had one of the biggest projects to date who wanted to operate on Slack Enterprise.

This was my chance to build a space the right way — to learn about features Slack had that the communities I had been in didn’t know existed, and create an environment that fostered collaboration, not created what I call a Cubicle Crutch.

I coined the term “Cubicle Crutch” in 2021 as a way to describe the misuse of seeing their coworkers online — aka relying on the little green “available” dot to ask questions instead of utilizing their digital literacy skills to find the answer & complete a task themselves.

Between this client project and now setting up my team for success, there were a few key features I kind of knew existed but had never used before but immediately saw the value after learning more.

But we have to take a step back and do some prep work before we set up these features, or else Slack will quickly become the Wild West. And that is something we definitely don’t want.

Slack Channel Structure

Aside from the unending notifications, my other pet peeve was channel structure. Most spaces I was a part of didn’t give much thought to the names & purpose of each one. Or worse — were constantly changing the channels and confusing users.

A great example… I recently launched a local coworking club here in Austin, so I posted about it in a local Slack Community on their channel called, ‘Meetup’.

Sounds right, right?

Wrong.

It was supposed to go in ‘Shameless Plug’, so my post was deleted.

Make it make sense.

So it’s not only important to name your channels correctly but give them a description and pin that so people know what the expectations are there.

Slack Channel Organization

Keep the channels to a minimum. IMO, it’s easier to add more later than remove clutter.

At _systms™ we have the following channels:

Announcements for our weekly updates
Client Work for tracking deliverables internally
Projects for internal projects
Circleback where all of our AI notes get added after meetings
Internal Processes… pretty obvious there
and lastly Finds for new features, etc. of the tools we use and/or build on for clients

Then we have a dedicated Slack Connect channel with every client.

Slack Channel Etiquette

The next, most important thing to develop is how you expect people to show up and engage in the channel.

Notifications aside, this is why I think most people find Slack overwhelming.

To reduce the chaos, you have to be a “thread-forward” thinker. Meaning, that every message should start a thread, and every response goes into that thread.

It’s a way to keep every thought, collaboration, question, request… in one place. I’ve seen many communities, where either people don’t know to reply to a message as a thread and think they’re responding to someone.

In turn, the initial poster doesn’t get a notification, and the channel becomes chaotic.

Now one thing I’ll add here that works for our internal project channel is posting each deliverable as its own message, so we can track them separately.

Slack Thread Emoji System

To reduce notifications further, I didn’t want to build a system where I was constantly getting notifications for new messages saying “working on it!” or “got it” — I wanted my team to have simple, quiet touch points — which is how we developed our emoji notification system.

These emojis are universal to our workspace, no matter the channel.

👀 — the person assigned has seen/read the new thread

✅ — the person assigned has completed the task

🔔 — this thread is important & a priority

🔕 — this thread is important but not a priority

🚧 — PM has feedback (this is followed by new messages in the thread)

🪩 — PM has approved the work

The greatest part of our emoji system is how much less time I spend on project management. Every morning I set aside 10–15 minutes to quickly glance at each thread & the emojis on them to get an idea of where to focus for the day.

Slack Connect & Folders

Every client we work with, outside of general consulting, receives a Slack Connect channel. I built a “template” for the initial message that I customize and pin to the top:

Then, we utilize Folders for bookmarks, such as the clients’ Miro Board, Workbook and any other resources they may have sent us. We keep a separate folder for Project Notes which are linked from Circleback.

Slack Canvas & Lists

Do I think you should have multiple note-taking wikis? No.

Do I think Slack Canvas is a useful alternative for storing information for short-term projects? Yes.

You can push Canvases out of Slack and into Notion or another tool using Zapier — that way you can work in one place in real time and then push into an archive for later reference.

The most recently launched is Slack Lists. If any tool is going to release a project management feature, this is what I expected it to be.

Like Canvases, you can create and link Lists across any of your channels to group various information together.

As my team has slowly moved away from managing projects in Notion, Lists are the missing piece to having a truly cohesive workspace in one tool.

I know you’re gasping for productivity, but I’ve said this for years, if Notion improved its commenting feature, I’d jump back in arms wide open, but until then Slack is killing it for our small, mighty team.

All in all, we’ve truly come to embrace the power of Slack for async work so I’m not afraid to admit that I was wrong about Slack, but I’m also not going to stop pointing fingers at those who steered me wrong either.

Written By: Sara Loretta

👋🏼 Sara Loretta is the Chief Digital Architect & Founder @ _systms™ — she’s also the 10th US Certified Notion Consultant, and 1st Certified Paperform Expert. Through her work and creatorship, Sara is focused on connecting and educating teams on tech, workflows, and all the ways they can optimize their business to scale.