Slack Integrations for a Better You
I recently started using slack to automate my personal workflow.
Slack is great. You can set up an account and invite up to X people for free. Then load up the web app on your computer (chrome on windows, xdg-open by default on Linux) and the app on your phone. This way you can funnel all your notifications and chats into channels of your choice.
I use it for 3 things:
- Getting google calendar event create/update/upcoming alerts
- Creating todos in Wunderlist
- Tracking changes to my Airtable Bases for some reason
Google Calendar
I like slack for calendar alerts because of the fact that I can get all notifications for my calendar and my wife’s calendar in the same channel. So when either of us adds or updates an event, a message gets created. If that event is something I really need to remember, I can pin it. This puts the message on the right panel of the web app, where everyone in the channel can see it.
The google calendar configurations are pretty robust, and you can link many calendars to a single slack channel.
Airtable
Less useful as a solo user, but still useful if you want a change history: Airtable.
Airtable is a neat web and mobile app that lets you swap seamlessly between forms and spreadsheets on a set of data called a ‘base’, which behaves like a database. The app is very friendly and intuitive. There are a ton of default fields, so records easy to customize and update on the fly. Getting information out of your base is simple with the many sorting, filtering, and view options (including kanban and calendar!), and the ability to export your data at any time. And all for free (with basic)! The paid plans get you things like more revision history, more space, more records/base, better support, and team features. I have bases for Fitness, Blog post scheduling and management, Project tracking, Side hustles, and Contacts. With the Slack integration, any change to any of them sends a message to my #automation channel on Slack.
To be honest, I don’t have a use for that information right now, but I could see the usefulness if I were to ever work on a project with someone else using both airtable and slack.
There is a Zapier zap that will stuff all new messages into a google spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the free zapier plan has a hard limit of 100 zap activations a month. I chewed through 5 in a sitting of Blog Editorial Calendar updates, so we’ll see how long it takes to hit that zap limit. The other drawback is the full text does not get included in the spreadsheet when there are sub messages, like a digest of changes to an airtable record, but this is mitigated by the link provided.
Wunderlist
Other Uses
The other day I needed a quick way to get code snippets from my Linux workstation to my Windows workstation, and my Linux workstation was connected to a different network. I quickly created a slack channel #mydev, and was sending information back and forth in seconds.
Downsides
A couple of downsides are the lack of persistent hangouts integration (you can only start a video hangouts from slack, not keep a hangout open, so someone with hangouts could message you and you could receive it in a slack channel. That would be cool!) and a lack of Google Keep integration. I would use the Keep integration all day long.