Slack canvas notes for 1:1's 👥

This is the 13th Petals snapshot of spring 2024 and today I want to provide a little bit of a productivity hack that I've realised I've been using a lot recently that others might find useful. So as a line manager I have many one to ones with my teammates and others, but it's more relevant to the people that I manage. And what I've been doing more recently is using our Slack chat canvas notes to record our conversations, because it's a really nice, convenient tool if you're in person. It's a little bit unnatural, but I still use it at the same time. Obviously we have a lot of conversations in slack, whether we're at home or in the office or whatever, so we have got the reference point from the last couple of weeks just to know what's been going on. We can pin little actions or conversations that we want to bring up in person when we actually have those conversations. And then what you can do in slack notes as well is just track actions as well. So you can quickly just do a square bracket action with an a reference to assign it to someone. You get the little notification back into Slack as well. And then when you have those follow up conversations, if it's not been done, you still got the audit trail of what we talked about doing. I found this quite useful as a line manager, especially when I'm managing over ten people at times, but the individuals find it really useful as well. They're not the best at remembering what we talked about every time, and the reminders that you can get within Slack's native features really help just kind of go. By the way, have you done your actions from what we talked about last time? It's a little, you know, give it a few days before the next one to one, then it gives them a little bit of a nudge to do it. So there we go. Nice little productivity hack for you today. Hopefully it's useful if you are a geek and you use slack for a lot of your chats. And I'll be back again tomorrow with another petal snack shot.