When your set time expires, you’ll have a chance to catch up on all the messages you missed in the interim. In truly urgent cases, it’s still possible to break through, but your colleagues will see a warning that requires them to confirm they know you’re on DND but want to reach you anyway. You’ll still receive Slack messages, but won’t receive notifications. Everyone on your team will see a little ‘z’ next to your name signifying your DND status, and if they try to send you a direct message, they’ll be notified that you’re unavailable. Just type /dnd followed by an amount of time (5 minutes, 2 hours, 1 day, etc.). If you need to stop the flow of information for a few minutes so you can focus, Slack's 'Do Not Disturb (DND) feature is a perfect solution.

Practice striking a good balance between brevity and descriptiveness like the defaults below: There are some basic status options available for quick updates, but you can use any emoji/text combination that suits your needs. If you're not communicating your status, you're forcing your colleagues to guess, and that's why keeping your status current is such a valuable habit to cultivate. This rings doubly true for teams with remote workers. Even if you’re sharing a physical office space, it can still be difficult for your teammates to guess what you’re up to at any given moment. Maybe you’re in a meeting, or heads-down on an important assignment. You’ll help your colleagues on the other end of the conversation know at a glance why you haven’t answered right away. Keep your status up to date so your team knows when to reach out, when not to, and why. If you need a quick reference guide to take along with you, we've got you covered with this downloadable PDF. You might be familiar with a few of these already, so feel free to use the shortcuts below to get to the information you need as quickly as possible. So how do you get the most out of Slack while navigating its challenges? We’ve boiled it down to six major functional areas every Slack user should learn. Like many groundbreaking tools, it continues to present a host of unique opportunities, but also some new challenges. Slack forever changed the way we communicate and collaborate at work.

Slack status app