How Slack made Doodle more productive

Slack is the premier communication tool for us at Doodle. It’s hard to imagine what work was like before it. Now our workspace is more than just our offices in Zurich, Berlin, Tel Aviv and Belgrade. All of us are connected on another plane, where work, communication and progress, are streamlined. We love Slack for all kinds of reasons, but here are the top 5.

And for all you Doodle fans out there that aren’t already on board with Slack, you can check out a special offer and get started today. get started today.

Channels

Slack channels are fundamental to our work. We use channels for everything. A general one with everyone included. Channels for our different teams; backend, design, apps, and so on. We have channels going for relevant tech news and even the weird stuff we stumble across on the web.

But what makes Slack so vital to our productivity as a company is that we create channels whenever a new topic arises. New project or idea? Start a conversation and add the relevant teammates. Inside of 5 minutes, we’ll have more ideas outlined and overall progress than if we’d scheduled a kick-off meeting and had to wait for a conference room.

Remote work

With the Doodle wheels turning in four different offices, we’re no strangers to remote work and conference calls. We use Slack to communicate in threads rather than emailing back and forth all the time, and we also use it for video instead of Skype or Hangouts.

You can use it for one-to-one meetings, or you can invite others to join. Our favorite part is the nifty sketch feature you can use when you share your screen. The sketch feature facilitates a little more back and forth between teammates when you’re presenting or communicating an idea. It’s funny how often you wish you could draw what you mean instead of describing it. Problem solved.

Apps

Slack offers hundreds of app integrations. When you can integrate all of the other tools you use on a daily basis with Slack, it becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. 2+2=5 right?

Google Drive – It’s so easy to manage all Google Drive needs from Slack. There’s no need to toggle back to email to approve access requests or find some lost comment notification. I’ll get every update on the documents I’m working right on my desktop.

Desk.com – When a user contacts us with feedback on a new feature, the message is automatically sent to our support channel in Slack. Our product team can have a look at it and discuss the next steps for implementation. There’s never any shortage of great ideas, and this Slack app helps to keep them coming.

Meekan

Our favorite app for Slack gets its own section. Meekan.

Meekan is the world’s smartest AI scheduling assistant. Meekan can connect everyone’s calendars, and propose the best times to meet, all through chat on Slack. Meekan learns your habits and the times you typically meet with certain people and bases its suggestions on that. No more early meetings or anything after 6. And it’s not just you either, Meekan will do its best to make your whole team happy, having already learned everyone’s schedules.

But Meekan can do more than just set meetings. It is your assistant after all. Ask Meekan to edit, reschedule, rename, or move meetings around too. If you’re late to the office, pull up Slack and ask Meekan to push your first meeting back 15 minutes. It’ll send out a notification letting everyone know. You can ask Meekan how many meetings you have tomorrow or next week, and it’ll give you a breakdown of your schedule.

We Doodlers are flying between our offices all the time. To help us out, Meekan can also check the world’s flight database and find the earliest arriving, shortest, and cheapest flights anywhere.

Mobile

All of these great features are available on the go with the Slack apps for Android and iOS. The Slack app is a great way to catch up on what I missed yesterday or to get a start on my workday while I’m on my commute. If you need to alert team members, you can tap the @ to bring up a list of teammates and groups. They’ll get a notification that they need to check out a thread or take a look at a document. With the app, it’s just as easy to swipe and set your status to away if you’re not taking your work home with you.

Slack enables us as a company to share our ideas, our creativity and our progress. It also helps us to send cat videos and weird gifs to each other the second we see them.