Should I make an app that rolls up Slack channel messages into a daily digest?
IMO one of Slack's main problems—especially in larger companies—is there can be so many messages flying around that you're constantly distracted from work. You'd like to pay less attention but feel compelled to check channels with messages due to FOMO. This sucks and harms productivity.
So I've been thinking about building a tool that lets you set up a personal digest of channels you select. You'd then receive daily highlights from those channels. By doing so you could mute those channels and focus on work without FOMO.
My main concerns are:
- Identifying messages to highlight is tricky
- We'd need Slack admins to buy the product who may not be the user
Questions:
- Would you find this useful?
- If so what kinds of channels would you include in your digest?
- Would you prefer digests via email or in Slack?
Input appreciated!
Definitely. We do a little of you are describing for our transaction metrics at Paytient. We have a couple channels that we post metrics to throughout the day - it gets pretty noisy. My daily report (for the previous day) arrives at 8am. We just summarize numbers so it's pretty straight forward, accurately identifying messages you want to see sounds like the challenge to solve.
Hey Keeg, that's interesting to hear. Is your report generated from Slack or the data sources? Do you mind if I ask how you achieved it? Thanks for the input!
unfortunately I didn't set it up so my knowledge is limited, but I do know it's using incoming webhooks.
Steven
I'd definitely find this useful. I'd go one step further than @ThePaulMcBride. Slack notifications (when you have too many channels) actually causes anxiety for me.
I'd prefer the email digest, and to be honest I would probably switch off Slack app if I was sure the Digest worked for me. Going down the email digest route may be more of a sell as the idea of Slack originally was to be an email killer wasn't it? This would be going against that. In saying this, the delivery mechanism is of way less importance to me than the curation actually working for me.
If you get it working, this is definitely a painkiller.
Thanks for this great insight. Being able to close Slack and find focus is the dream. Would you want to do anything else to tailor digests to what you're interested in beyond selecting specific channels?
Mmmm.. perhaps key words/phrases (much like tags) would be useful to have more control over the curation. That way you could filter out more stuff that wasn't as important to you.
We ended up building this, all be it with more of a community focus :) Anyone ever want a demo let me know! https://getlowdown.com
Yes. It would be great to see the highlights from each group with some analytics on user contributions, etc...
Oh, that's a wonderful idea! Good luck!
I would love something like this! I’m in a lot of slack groups and the little red bubble causes me to break My focus on what I’m working on check them just to get rid of the bubble. Most of the time the messages are important but rarely time sensitive. Being able to forget about them and be notified later in a single easy to read email would be amazing.
That's good to hear you feel that pain (not that you suffer it) ☺️
Yes, although my main issue with running a Slack channel is finding content to share in it – would be great if there was a way to easily save/curate articles/videos etc and send them out in Slack and recycle it for a newsletter.
Cheers Kyle there are certainly lots of issues with Slack - cheers for flagging this!
I am in tons of slack channels. It’s overwhelming. Having more granular control and a more curated feed would be great!
Cool thanks for sharing!
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Hey Anna, do you think the communities you're in would install a tool like this? That's part of the main issue is that it requires uptake by the people in charge. Thanks!
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