- Cal Henderson, Slack's cofounder and chief technology officer, works from home in San Francisco.
- He shared with Insider his tips to avoid getting overwhelmed while using the instant-messaging app.
Even before the pandemic sparked a work-from-home revolution, the instant-messaging platform Slack haunted office workers so much that someone went viral for dressing up as a Slack notification for Halloween.
Slack helps staff at 100,000 organizations and 77% of Fortune 100 companies stay in touch in the era of hybrid working, according to the company.
But its pop-up push notifications, accompanied by sound by default, can be distracting.
In an interview with Insider, Slack's cofounder and chief technology officer, Cal Henderson, acknowledged that the scale of information it offered could leave people overwhelmed.
But his written work communication is so embedded in Slack that he said he hadn't emailed a colleague in over a decade.
The trick is to stop using Slack like email, Henderson said, where "you have an individualized inbox and everything in it is meant for you." He compared that with Slack, "where you have access to a lot of things, but you don't necessarily need to read them all."
"For any sizable organization, you will never read all the things that are available to you," he added. "It definitely puts more onus on the reader rather than the sender to decide what information you want to follow."
He shared three ways he learned to stay on top of messages and zone out noise, "so that I can see information but I'm not overwhelmed by it."
1. Rank channels by what's most important right now and get push notifications only for some
Henderson has thousands of groups, or "channels," on his Slack dashboard. To avoid overload, he puts them in tiers on his sidebar.
"I broadly put channels into categories of things I really need to read as they happen," Henderson said. "That might be a particular project I'm on or my staff channel."
He gets push notifications on his phone for channels that are directly relevant to his current projects. Then, he "aggressively" categorizes the remaining channels into those he will regularly read and those he may read when he has time, he said.
He puts the most important channels, depending on what he is working on, at the top of his sidebar.
The less important the channel, the lower down he places it.
"I'm never going to read everything," he said.
He fine-tunes channels' notification settings so he can ignore messages that matter less to his day-to-day work and come back to them in his own time.
2. Decide when you won't respond to messages and schedule messages to respect others' work hours
Henderson said he had no patience for bosses who send emails at night, like Elon Musk.
"Is the expectation that everyone should be working? That sounds terrible," he said.
He added that he set "healthy boundaries" and did not respond to messages in the evening or overnight on weekdays or on weekends. That's family or sleep time unless there's a work emergency, he added.
If he does work late or on the weekend and needs to message a colleague, he schedules this for normal work hours to avoid disturbing them or "setting an expectation that they should reply," he said.
3. Experiment with video clips to replace meetings
Henderson said he started to feel "Zoom fatigue" about two years into the pandemic, adding that his calendar was full of "back-to-back 30-minute Zoom slots."
Slack has staff working across time zones, so it wasn't possible to schedule a meeting for everyone to attend, Henderson said. Either staff were left out or he had to run meetings twice, which he called "a waste of everybody's time."
Henderson uses Slack Clips to record short videos that replace information-sharing meetings.
If he needs to be briefed about a customer before a meeting, he prefers for those briefing him to send a video clip, rather than schedule a meeting.
Staff are also encouraged to post updates in the Slack channel dedicated to a particular project to cut down on meetings, he said.