I was talking to my colleague earlier today, and I mentioned to her a really nifty feature in Slack that allows me to monitor discussions about topics I deem interesting without actually spending time cruising through tens of channels. I think some of you might find this useful, so here is a really short post on the "My keywords" feature and how you can use it to stay close to the action on Slack.
The Problem
If you ever had the pleasure of using Slack at work, you know these workspaces grow into hundreds if not thousands of channels, and it becomes impossible to keep track of discussions in a sea of messages, files, and notifications. Spending hours out of your watching channels and reading every thread to make sure you don't miss interesting discussions is a rather terrible idea and a waste of your work hours. This is where My keywords come in.
My Keywords
"My keywords" is a neat little feature I stumbled upon recently while tweaking some of my Slack app preferences. It's basically an input box where you list a bunch of keywords – separated by commas – and Slack will send you a notification every time any of the keywords are used in a channel that you have joined, thus making it a bit easier to keep track of certain discussions on Slack even when you don't actively follow them.
Slack
Whenever someone uses one of your keywords in a channel you've joined, you'll receive a notification and see the keyword highlighted in yellow (source)
My keywords can be a powerful tool for keeping an eye on interesting discussions and capturing questions/issues around certain topics without churning too much time reading hundreds of Slack threads. That's it!!