Monitor Interesting Slack Discussions Using "My keywords"

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.

ℹ️
I am not going to give you tips on how to consume Slack messages and conversations productively, there are numerous articles online on how to do that, so a simple Google search would get you some starting pointers.

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.

Get notified about topics you care about
What you’ll learn in 2 minutes or less: How to set up keywords so you’ll get notified about topics you care about in channels you’ve joined.Stay on top of projects you’re working on and get no...
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)
⚠️
Don't pick generic words or words that are common because that will just break your notifications and destroy any benefit you might have gotten out of this feature. Choose your keywords carefully.

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!!