Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I think that storing data in Slack is a bit of an antipattern.

I'll avoid saying "You should" beacuse everyone's workflow is different, but:

I like to treat Slack like e-mail. I'm also a fan of GTD(Getting Things Done), and a pretty big part of that (and things like Inbox Zero) is that _you don't leave important stuff in your inbox_.

If there's some info in slack that will be valuable for more than 15 minutes, it's likely that it belongs somewhere else!

When dealing with bugs, I copy the chat (well, a link to the chat) into a card in Trello. Same for basically any request that requires me to do something. I do use Slack reminders for calendar-based events.

I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person in real life. If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. You can probably accomplish some of this with pins inside Slack, but I've never accomplished it.

I think that this is one of those intractable problems where, because people work differently together and in individual workflows, it's hard to solve the "long-term coordination" problem without bogging down the "short-term coordination" problem.

Anyways, text is forever, but so are newspapers on microfilm. But we still make history books.




For some ideas on how to automate the cross-referencing that you're describing, see https://stackstorm.com/2016/01/29/unifying-disparate-applica...


> I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person

Exactly! A channel is just like a meeting room, you can expect me to constantly follow more than one or two channels, for the others, @channel or @myusername.


A great point, but saving from Slack isn't the most straightforward. It's not as brainless as "Select text & hit 'Save to Evernote'" which I do in my web browsers. I've resorted to screenshots a few times, to keep the richness of the messages.

> If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly.

Where do you write it?


My philosophy on this is "don't be afraid." It's all 1s and 0s to the machine when you're digital, so it's OK to dump 10 paragraphs into certain text boxes. If you want to do something, you can usually do it! A lot of programs let you paste images in directly nowadays.

If you're OK with having links to chats instead of the chat text itself, you can click the timestamps in a Slack chat to get a permalink . Sometimes I just copy the entire chat and paste it into Trello.

Which leads to "where". Most things I end up with are small tasks like bugfixes. Actionable tasks for the immediate. As much of that goes into Trello as possible. I'm not afraid of making multi-paragraph cards that copy the chat verbatim either (it's all 1s and 0s, right).

I also do the whole "screenshot" thing too. Take a screenshot and also paste it right into Trello.

Some stuff is important in the immediate but I'll throw away later. Temporary notes for things like user support. I use OS X's Notes app, which is basically notepad with tabs (I would likely use Notepad++ on Windows to accomplish this). It's all temporary notes, but still nice because it doesn't scroll up as other people start talking.

If I have something like a long-term reference, I try really hard to find a good place for it on a case-by-case basis. Usually that involves writing a text file (markdown) and putting it into Dropbox. On OS X I use LightPaper (a great little app), on Android I use Draft[1] (iOS has a thing called Drafts). Both apps are set up to point to the same folder, so I have these references on my phone too.

I also use text files for journaling what I'm trying to accomplish. For example, at work I'm working with a system that will physically mail documents back to me, so I wrote down exactly my operations so that when the docs get back to me I know what I did:

    Sent two pdfs (located in Documents) on invoice `weFFEA123231`. One is Letter size instead of A4, another is A3 size. 

    Also sending Invoice `weFFEA123232` with just the letter-size page(`2015.pdf`).

    A "user space unit" in PDF is 1/72nd of an inch.
Sometimes this log dead-ends, most recent entry:

    For compressor and source maps, thing that's likely needed is to rewrite the JS compressor.

    An easy solution would be 

    -----

I also use my calendar! I'll also just paste random stuff into my calendar for information I'll need at a certain event (for example reservation confirmation numbers).

This veered slightly off topic but tl;dr is: Trello for tasks, Notes for temp notes, LightPaper for reference+journaling, Calendar for time-sensitive information.

[1]: http://www.mvilla.it/draft/


not sure if they changed course, but slack has been talking about becoming the hub for all business comms and files and eating into ms office/google apps


Which likely means they'll start favoring their apps which will be the end of many people using slack. I don't want to see that.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: