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We love Slack — and we bet you do too! But messaging apps pose a unique challenge because they continually draw us back in over the course of a day. This pattern of distraction undermines our ability to focus and leads to us feeling overwhelmed.
Produce8 is a digital work analytics platform. We provide the data to visualize challenges and the insights needed to measure the effectiveness of the changes you make to solve those challenges.
This playbook will help you:
And the best part: You can run this whole playbook with Produce8 for free!
By prioritizing these three easy steps, you’ll have the tools, strategies, and insights to recover time in your day.
We know that Slack is distracting and that you’d like that to change. But making changes to collaboration tools is not straightforward due to internal and external causes:
Internal: Checking Slack makes you feel good
When you check notifications, your brain releases a small amount of dopamine . This rewards your alertness and reinforces the pattern you’re trying to break.
External: You feel pressure to be online
Many organizations want their employees to concentrate on their individual work while also being available for collaboration .
Without data, we’re left guessing at how much this affects us every day. With data from Produce8, we get objectivity and visibility into what work actually looks like.
Our goal is to empower you to identify and reduce the number of short, low-value Slack interactions that represent interruptions throughout your day. By doing so, we promote more meaningful collaboration on Slack and give you the freedom to concentrate on other tasks.
We recommend beginning at the start of a week and breaking each step into weekly segments. But feel free to adjust the timeline to your personal working style.
In this step, you will get the data necessary to learn about your work habits.
First, let’s sign up for Produce8 by clicking the link here .
Once you have an account, connect Slack from the app list during setup in Produce8.
If you use Slack on your computer, add the Produce8 desktop extension. If you use Slack on a web browser, add the browser extension. If you use it both ways, add both extensions.
NOTE: Produce8 is currently not available for mobile devices.
When you start working with Produce8, daily insights will be sent to your email inbox. They will also be visible in your personal workspace.
Now that you have successfully set up Produce8 with Slack, you can go about your week as you normally would. The next few days will establish a baseline of your Slack usage.
If you find yourself working more intentionally in Slack during this time, that's okay. It means you can start from a more advantageous position.
Observe what your work in Slack looked like at the end of your first week. Then note any interesting findings. This will help you prepare for the changes you’ll make in the next step.
Timeline
The Timeline is an excellent starting point. It provides you with an overview of the frequency, duration, and focus of events throughout the day.
Metrics
The Metrics tab shows you different ways we report on Slack usage.
You'll likely see many interactions throughout the day, which is normal. Slack interruptions are brief but frequent. Expect around 50 to 200 of these interactions daily.
Take some time to reflect on how Slack impacts your productivity . The following questions will help you analyze your data. We recommend writing down your answers so you can reflect on them later.
Answering these questions will give you a better understanding of the scale of your Slack distraction.
Now you have a base understanding of how you regularly use Slack. Great. It’s time to make changes and study the impact.
Approach this step by setting targets for your number of Slack interactions per day and in turn reduce Slack interruptions.
Pro Tip: A secondary goal is to increase your average duration in Slack, thus indicating more purposeful engagement.
In this example, weekly Slack interactions are at 402. Let’s set a goal to reduce the average weekly interactions by 25% to 301.
Once you have a goal, you are ready to configure Slack. Here are some quick and easy Slack changes you can make:
Slack alerts configurations:
Slack channels configurations:
Slack messages configurations:
Slack best practices configurations:
We recommend picking a configuration that sparks your curiosity. If you ever wonder if turning off Slack notifications or using statuses actually make a difference, now is the time to find out.
Change can be uncomfortable. But don't worry! If you catch yourself unintentionally checking Slack, gently redirect your focus back to your tasks.
You’ll begin to notice some results, but don't obsess over the data just yet. If you feel the urge to see how things are going, check the morning daily reports.
Once you have a workweek of data, jump into Produce8 to review your Slack interactions and the changes you’ve made.
Did your interactions in Slack decrease?
In this example, the goal was to reduce the average weekly interactions by 25% from 402 to 301. The result was a reduction of 11% to 358 interactions. Progress!
If you hit or approached your goal, the change might’ve made a difference.
Don’t get discouraged if you didn’t achieve your results. All that means is that you need to take a closer look and decide whether it’s time to try something new.
And here’s the good news: With Produce8, you have the data to validate whether a change is working or not. The numbers are clear and won’t leave you guessing.
You now have some valuable insights to inform your next steps. So:
Depending on your results and whether or not you’ve met your goals, consider:
Produce8 helps you measure how effective focus techniques like the Pomodoro timer are by checking your Slack activity during those planned time blocks. Your timeline will show if you successfully stayed focused for the 25-minute work period and confirm how well the technique works.
Great work so far! You’re getting the hang of using digital work analytics to optimize your workday. You are receiving your Daily Reports and checking in on Produce8 regularly to see how Slack affects your productivity.
If you ever feel overwhelmed by the data, remember to focus on the key question: Are Slack interactions decreasing?
You can also ask:
Building a habit of intentionality allows you to optimize your collaboration tools and diagnose issues in your workflow more effectively.
You now have accurate data that shows what collaboration distraction looks like. So, go ahead and repeat these three steps to keep improving your app usage and collaboration workflows.
As you build upon your learnings, you’ll discover that you may not have full control of the organization and team guidelines. This means there are opportunities to invite people to explore their Slack usage with you. Bring them together to gain a shared understanding and make collective changes.
If you wish to extend the study to your team, we offer a comprehensive Slack + Produce8 Playbook to guide everyone through the process.
Produce8 doesn’t just analyze data in Slack. There is a wide variety of apps you can look at.
We recommend including your essential collaboration apps (Gmail, Zoom, Miro, etc.), production apps (Google Docs, Hubspot, Figma, etc.), and your project and task management apps (Notion, Asana, Trello, etc.) to get a full picture of your workday.
Upgrade for more insights
The Produce8 Free Plan gives you access to 21 days of historical data. While that is plenty of time to get the baseline and validate the changes you’ve made, our Paid Plan offers you unlimited data, workspaces, app analyzation, and the ability to invite more team members.
If you have any questions about the approaches shared in this Playbook or Produce8, please get in touch with us. We're here to support you every step of the way and would be absolutely thrilled to answer your questions.