How I Use Slack
Slack is an amazing communication and productivity tool aimed at teams who work together. It's slick, powerful, available everywhere, and is always being improved upon. I like it, a lot.
The problem is, I don't work on a team that uses Slack. My bank uses SharePoint and it's awful. They just upgraded to IE10 a few weeks ago and that was a cutting edge move for them, so you can see how something like Slack would seem like witchcraft to them. But I digress.
I want to tell you how I use Slack because I believe it's a bit different than most folks. You see, my family is separated by hundreds and hundreds of miles. I have a sister, and her boyfriend, in Seattle, my wife and I are in KC, another sister currently in Texas, and my parents live back home in Detroit. So regular get togethers don't happen, it's just not feasible.
## Enter Slack
We use Slack as a family communication and sharing tool. Instead of having to track group text messages, and figuring out how to share photos, recipes, good articles and the like, we can dump it all into Slack. Once it gets put into Slack it is immediately sent to the correct parties and it becomes searchable for later discovery. It really is magic.
In one location, we can have group conversations, direct messages, photo and file sharing, Twitter and Dropbox integration. No more 'did Dad send that in a text message or an email?' Now all I have to do is search in Slack and voila, it's there.
Case in point, my parent's are currently having their Kitchen and Den areas completely redone. Both rooms were utterly destroyed and are being rebuilt. So my mom has used Slack to post regular updates on the contruction. It's been an incredibly useful way for all of us kids to track the progress of the project from our various locales across the country.
An added bonus to Slack is it's cross platform functionality. My wife and I live firmly within the Apple ecosystem, but we're the only ones in our family that have gone full-Apple, everyone else in the family has a Windows PC. There are 5 iPhones, 1 Android phone and 1 non-smart phone; my oldest sister is holding out and I think she's a rockstar because of it.
Slack can handle all of this in stride. It syncs across all these platforms (except for the non-smart phone, of course), and does so with ease. So no matter what sort of OS our computers are running we can send up a message to the rest of the family knowing that they will receive it immediately on their device of choice. It's spectactular.
I love Slack because it gives my family an easy, fun, and powerful way to stay in touch with each other across the vast distances that separate us. You should play with it, I'm confident you'll love it.