What's your favorite productivity app/tool on SLACK and why you love it?

"Arguably" being a key word -- Estimated number of users on various collab tools according to some quick searches:

Slack - 12 million

Jira - 25 million

Teams - 75 million

Sharepoint - 190 million

Sure, Slack is popular, and almost everyone I know uses it. But it is a messaging tool. It is absolutely eclipsed by other collaborative tools, especially in Enterprise IT, once you expand beyond messaging. Most companies I know do not make Slack into the hub for all things collaborative.

We use Slack but strive to be responsible about it. We've worked upstream to write better issues using issue templates, leverage conversations on GitLab comments to these issues, Wiki, etc. We put a lot of effort to let people focus. I even told the team it's better to disable notifications, and told them explicitly I don't expect and answer right away, and that if I do or they do, that would be the exception rather than the rule. When these exceptions occur, we treat the incident, and then dig to find the root cause that made it necessary to tap on someone's shoulder, and then we fix those to avoid that in the future. Writing better docs, adding sections to issue templates, recovery mechanisms, code, etc. This is valid for everything, even payroll or taxes where someone had to call me to fix something and we instaured things not to have that emergency come again.

We do everything possible to safeguard people's focus. Then when we do calls, we have a collaborative notebook (right in the platform we're building) we can live edit where we put the agenda beforehand. People add things they want to talk about.

During the call, we can add points and remarks, answer the questions, and write proof of concept code right into that executable notebook.

We're at a point where people look forward to calls. It's a balance.

No productivity tool matters if people don't let other people produce something in the first place.

For me the biggest productivity killer is watching a Slack conversation unfold in real-time -- and hovering over it waiting for each new sentence to appear. So the truth is that stepping away from Slack, and just coming back to it when the conversation has finished, saves a lot of time.

There's a lot of real gains that can be made if you limit the amount of time you spend on Slack.

Honestly I love that our company has giphy on slack and I use it quite frequently. There are other productive tools like the integration with google calendar to know when somebody is on a meeting or zoom to quickly start a zoom call, but giphy says something about my company, it’s culture and can bring some very much needed levity to the day to day grind.