Overview
Slack and other services include a Scheduled Send feature which allows you to send a message at some point in the future, without further effort on your part. Initially Slack limited this feature to channels, but recently it was also expanded to work in threads. So now seems like a good time to consider why you might want to take advantage of this feature.
Generally we’re happy to send our Slack messages in real time and we hope for an answer within moments. The asynchronous nature of Slack lends itself to sending messages regardless of what time of day it may be for any of the parties involved. But there are occasions when asynchronous has downsides and for those times, Scheduled Send is your friend.
Good Scenarios for Scheduled Send
Let’s go through some situations where you’d want to use this feature.
Announcements and Reminders
Maybe you’re working on a project where you need to keep reminding folks to fill out a form or click through some process. Maybe you’ve got a weekly meeting and you want to ask for discussion items. Maybe you want to make sure your announcement goes out at a time that most people are paying attention. In all of these cases, Scheduled Send is your friend.
Taking advantage of Slack Workflows could be another way to accomplish this, but Workflows may not be available to you in your organization. Scheduled Send is more likely to be available and could be less trouble for short-term projects.
If you don’t want to risk forgetting to send the announcement, setting it up in Scheduled Send relieves you to focus on other things. You can schedule the same announcement or slightly different announcements several times on a weekly or monthly basis out into the future, similar to the way social media schedulers work. It doesn’t matter if you get sick or busy. This part of your duties is taken care of.
Marketers often time their ads to maximize their response rate. Don’t be afraid to apply these sorts of optimizations to your internal project campaigns to make sure you’re getting as many folks paying attention as practical.
Drafts and Daily Updates
Maybe you need to send a daily update in Slack and you forget to click send some days. Maybe you write drafts of messages in Slack and forget to send them. In all of these cases, Scheduled Send is your friend.
For daily updates, I don’t want to try to remember every thread I was involved in at the end of a tiring day so I usually keep a draft going of what I’ve been doing so I can send it to the team at the end of the day. But sometimes I forget to send the draft at the end of the day. [sigh] Scheduled Send saves me from myself, when I use it. Using Scheduled Send instead of a draft in the channel also frees up that channel so I can send other messages in it.
The only negative I’ve run into from using Scheduled Send for this is that you end up with undesirable previews for links in the message. I’d love for there to be a way to suppress the previews, but I’m so happy that Scheduled Send finally works in threads that I don’t want to seem to be complaining.
Respecting Work Hours
If I’m working at hours that are atypical for the rest of my team I will try to use Scheduled Send for non-urgent messages. When starting a new thread or question, asking that question at an odd time can create the expectation for others to chime in and work at times that they would not otherwise be working or wanting to work. If there’s an operational priority, there’s a good reason to ask someone to give up some family time for some off-hours work. Otherwise, I want to respect everyone’s downtime and wait for a better time to start the new discussion.
If considering others doesn’t motivate you, then consider how Scheduled Send can save you time. When you think about a discussion thread for the team tomorrow, put in Scheduled Send for 9am. It won’t matter if you’re eating breakfast or in a meeting, your discussion will start and you’ll see responses when you can tune it back in. Your team will see the item first thing and you don’t have to worry about it getting buried by earlier threads.
Another selfish motivation for this is that you avoid getting into a lengthy conversation at the end of your long work day. Sending off one last question and calling it a day sounded great until you saw that your boss already responded to your question with more questions. Now you’re doing research and pasting information. Don’t you wish that you had remembered that Scheduled Send is your friend?
Conclusion
I hope I’ve shown a variety of good times to take advantage of the Scheduled Send feature. It has been a great productivity boost for me. I can work whenever works for me and not impose that on anyone else. Hopefully this gave you some ideas for ways to be more effective and respectful in your work life.
Meta
This month I was hoping to post an article I’m working on about Gamification in Google Maps, but it has not come together yet. You can always see the current list of ideas and their likelihood. It could still come together before next month.
My goal is to get one thing posted every month, but last year I only posted in 4 out of the 12 months. I am glad that I got 8 things posted for the whole year. I wish I had planned a bit better and they weren’t so clumped into so few months. The gap from October to January is not hard to justify given work and personal circumstances, yet I hope to do better in the future. The main way I hope to help with this is to get more things into draft form sooner. I’m also considering doing more non-technical blog-style posts like Neckties of July 2024. Regardless, I’m glad my pace of writing is picking up.
Thanks for reading this far. I appreciate the time and I’m open to your feedback.