Slack is our selected main communication channel for our day-to-day work. It is definitely one of our most important tools in the company. Here we make announcements, questions to solve blockers and even communicate availability. About this last one is what I will like to talk about in this post: Availability communication. 

Have you ever written to someone and they just don’t answer in 5, 10, and even 30 minutes? You see them online, but no answer comes and you have no clue of what is happening? Well, this is what I mean by availability communication. When you work remotely, you just don’t know what is happening in the other places and fast and effective communication is key. Maybe at that moment, the other person is in a meeting, doing a pause, having lunch, or simply concentrating on a task; but there is no way you know that. The solution: Updating your Status. 

At least in our team, this is a very unused feature. We normally write in a channel “brb” which means we are leaving for some minutes, but this is not as useful as the status. Why? Because if you don’t read the message or forget about it, then you are again with no clue. Instead, if you are talking to someone and they have their status updated you can immediately see what they are up to.

In our team, we have different lunch and active pauses schedules, so with status now you don’t have to remember which is the hour of each one, you just check their status to know their availability. 

Setting your status is very easy, you can even configure when to clear it. This is very important to set it so everyone knows when you will be back.

There is even an app within slack that automatically updates your status according to your schedule: The Google Calendar App. This app sets reminders a minute before every meeting and updates your status to “meeting” when in your calendar there is one. Great, right?

I hope this post encourages you to start using this great Slack’s feature 🙂 

Let me read you on comments.