One-Click Wonders in 2021 to Speed up Your Work Life — Part 1, Slack Quick Emojis

We all want minimal effort these days. One-click (or less!) has been more and more pervasive in software. Think about Gmail and LinkedIn auto-complete responses, “Like” buttons in Facebook and Twitter, and many more. There is so much information out there, the more we streamline our interactions with that flood of data, the more we feel we can participate with it without massive time commitments. We want to be heard as well as reflect our feelings to others that we hear them. Somewhat like yelling to your friend across a roaring river of information. I listed some social media examples, what about our work life? I’m seeing this “B2C” behavior cross into “B2B” apps more and more, and wanted to highlight some!

Slack has done a wonderful job of enabling as few clicks to interact with your colleagues as possible. Have you seen the “one-click” emoji reactions when you hover above a message?

We use one-click emojis to show we’ve recognized the message, or have begun to take some action. I use the ✅ to signify that I’ve processed a Centro lead from Salesforce, for example.This saves me a surprising amount of time hunting and pecking emojis in the Emoji picker window, and let’s my co-workers show I’ve recognized their message. How do you configure this in Slack?

There are two settings in Slack. The first is done at the workspace level (you’ll need your workspace admin to set this). The admin will set the global one-click emojis for the workspace here:

Next, the admin will set the 3 emojis all members will see (it even shows a nice little preview!):

Now, all users will see the one-click emojis after each individual configures their preferences. First, go to your personal preferences:

Now, enable one-click reactions, and override the administrators default settings if you wish!

That’s it! Now you can quickly react to messages, giving your acknowledgement. Here’s some suggested emojis to bake into your culture:

✅ : Completed
👀 : I’m looking into it
👏 : Bravo
🛑 : Wait or Stop

Let me know what emojis you use to stay productive with your team!

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