Annoyed by Slack messages disrupting your work ?

The pandemic has forced an unprecedented number of teams into working from home, and a major chunk of them seem to have opted for Slack to be their collaboration and communication tool. But, many Slack teams often complain about how the overload of information and the incessant flow of messages seem to get annoying (and sometimes overwhelming) when you are trying hard to get your work done. This frequent disruption of work not only reduces your productivity (you can read about it in more detail here : your Slack team may be losing upto $20,000 every month ) , but it can also add to a lot of unnecessary stress due to tasks being left incomplete. This isn't really Slack's fault, and has got more to do with how teams use Slack. Due to an easy interface and the illusion of constant availability, users are tempted to send messages continuously and force conversations to be synchronous. We wanted to try and solve this problem and restore Slack's usefulness, without having to radically change the way people already work on Slack. This is what led to the creation of Dripfeedbot, which i would like to introduce in this article.

Controlled DM Inbox

Usually, you have no control on when a message notification comes and have to discourage users from contacting you ,by changing your status or letting them know that you are busy with some other task. But, that usually creates delays in communication and also could be inconvenient for you as well as for your team. Now, you can choose when you want to see your messages and interact with them only when you are actually free to do so, without others needing to know about your work status and without them having to be hesitant about disturbing you.

Channel Dripfeed Messages

Instead of users publishing messages randomly to your Slack channels, dripfeedbot helps to regularize the notifications from messages which don't necessarily need your direct action. The messages are batched together and published at regular intervals of 20 minutes. This reduces the intermittent interruptions for users and also helps to bring more interaction . 

User Whitelisting

Sometimes you may want to get messages from specific users immediately, while still retaining the benefits of having the acknowledgement and reply features. You can add such users to your personal whitelist, which dripfeedbot will use to skip the queue and show your message directly.

Multiple Recipients

You can send the same message to multiple users at once without having to separately create a channel for it. The subsequent replies to the messages will show the previous message content and hence help with quickly understanding the context of the conversation .

Quick Action

Many messages are often sent just to acknowledge the receival of a message,but crafting the right reply often takes up an unnecessary chunk of time. The "ack" button on dripfeed messages helps you to directly and professionally inform the sender that you have taken notice of their message. Also, usually messages are in a threaded format but that leaves gaps when you are discussing multiple issues. Instead now, you can split your concerns into separate messages and have replies along with the mention of the context of the conversation.

Auto-reminders

Setting reminders for messages is often an unavoidable part of your daily work regime, but it can also unknowingly cause leaks in your productivity due to having to set a specific time. Now you can just send a dripfeed message to yourself and then "snooze" it back if you want to be reminded later, all within Slack and just with the click of a button. You can also use the snooze functionality to be reminded later about messages that others have sent to you.

Hope you will give Dripfeedbot a try and let me know your honest feedback [7 days Free Trial , no credit card info required]