Slack Messages as Todos

A lot of "little requests" come in as todos in Slack. That's always been true for me, regardless of the company I worked at or how intentional of a process we had for capturing tasks.

One of the "secret tools" I've used to make this work is tagging a message that I will investigate or do with the 👀 emoji.

On its own, this behavior could seem incredibly daunting to keep up with, but I pair it with a super power: Slack search with "hasmy:👀".

This allows me to see everything I currently have open or haven't notified others that I've completed.

When I'm done with the task, I'll thread a message of "All set" and ask for the person who requested to confirm that it's fixed. Then I'll add a 💤 emoji so that it's easy for me to see what I have eyes on and am waiting on confirmation for as "done".

Once I get a confirmation that something is done, I'll replace the 👀 emoji with a ✅.

In marking the message with a 👀, I'm signaling to the rest of the team that I'm looking at it. In marking the message with a ✅, I'm signaling to the team that I've completed it.

This micro workflow has some great side effects:

• I don't have to keep mini side quests as tasks in Obsidian
• I have one place to keep my mini side quests
• I signal to others who could also do the work that I've taken it on
• I signal to others when the task is done
• I have a rollup of tasks because of the search