7 Rules for effective slacking

Had a discussion with a friend about utility of slack. I am on the camp slack is really great when you can reduce the cruft around it. Here are the rules I follow for slack.

1. Dont be afraid to join all channels. Mute 90% of them. Slack is awesome, it brings whole companies knowledge base to a single place. It’s akin to forum’s of old days with steroids. I love how you can delve into any teams chatter and understand whats going on. Having said that most of the time, this tends to be a fire hose of information for me. So I tend to join lot of channels and only concentrate on following conversations only in select few. Rest of them for most part I mute and throw it under muted engineering and non-engineering folders.
2. Enable show only unread messages channels setting. When you join so many channels, combined with personal messages number of things to track can become overwhelming real fast. To keep slack clear and distraction free, I enable this setting. Pretty easy to concentrate on what matters and what does not.
3. Star max(1%, 5) of channels. While its all nice to keep slack clean, but its a hassle to always search for group or person who we frequently talk to. To solve this I star a select few channels or individuals who I am talking a lot with at any given point of time.
4. Disable all notifications, including personal. For me this has been biggest gain in terms of productivity. Slack is not a place where others can take away your piece of mind. To achieve your flow state, I feel you should totally disable all your notifications including personal ones. If it is that important, they will page or call you. Its that simple.
5. Anytime a discussion involves more than 3 people and generate 10 msgs per min. Call for either in person meeting or call for a doc. I would apply same rules for 1 on 1 discussions. Its not productive to carry deep discussions inside slack. Its good and all for co-ordinating during incident, not worth for debugging issues with another person or trying to design your next big microservice. A doc allows you to keep on your toes about the topic at hand rather than being all over the place when you try to reply for messages inside a slack. I would say same applies for solving non trivial problems.
6. For help channels, give sla and enable auto responses possible. There should never be an expectation of less than x minutes response in help channels. I like the idea of office hours for help related stuff and an sla in hours if not days to get to all issues. If it is that important, again page or tag person.
7. Encourage the culture of searching through history as much as possible. As mentioned before for me the best part about slack is the incredible amount of knowledge that we collect at one place. It would be have been nice for slack to have a bot which matches questions by looking into history of all discussions. Minus that, one should encourage people to search through slack before asking atleast trivial questions.