Slack Without the Scroll of Doom

I came back from lunch to 312 Slack messages.

One of them was an actual question for me.

Finding it took 20 minutes.

The friend who reads the group chat

Every family has a WhatsApp group.

Two hundred messages a day.

Good morning images.

Forwarded videos.

And somewhere in there: "Dinner at Maila's house on Saturday."

Luckily, there's always that one cousin who reads everything and tells you,

"Basically, dinner Saturday, bring sweets."

That's what an AI connected to Slack can be.

The cousin who read the group chat.

What to ask for

When an assistant can read your Slack channels, the useful question isn't "what happened?"

It's "what matters to me?"

Bad:
Summarise Slack.
 
Good:
Summarise #backend and #release from the last
4 hours. Tell me: decisions made, anything that
mentions me or my services, and any question
that's still unanswered. Skip jokes and emoji reactions.

"Skip jokes and emoji reactions" saves about 80% of the reading.

Meet Rohan

Rohan is a backend engineer.

He used to start every day scrolling Slack for 30 minutes.

Now he asks for a summary of his three main channels.

He reads it in two minutes.

He replies to the one question that's waiting on him.

Then he opens his editor.

That's 28 minutes back. Every day.

Keep replies human

Summaries are great.

Replies should still come from you, or at least be reviewed by you.

Your team wants to hear from Rohan, not from an assistant guessing what Rohan thinks.

So use AI to catch up.

Use your own words, or approved drafts, to respond.

Final thoughts

Slack isn't a novel.

You don't need to read every page.

You need the cousin who says, "Dinner Saturday, bring sweets."

Let AI read the scroll.

You answer the question.

Then get back to work.