How to Use Slack Lists for Simple Project Tracking (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: You know all that work that you do that doesn't become a record in Salesforce? There's an easy way to track that with a list in Slack. Check this out. Hello and welcome back to Slack School. My name is Mike Reynolds. I'm your host. I'm part of the Slack team here at Salesforce. And today we're going to be talking about lists in Slack. Lists in Slack are structured tables that help you track and manage stuff directly in Slack where your team is already working. If you use Salesforce, you understand the value of having data live in Salesforce. Lists are not for that data. Think about the other stuff that you need to do to be able to do your job that isn't an account or a contact. For myself, I use lists to organize ideas for all sorts of things. Slack school episodes, tracking conferences that I need to submit presentations to. I even use a list in my own personal org to track holiday gift giving ideas. Anytime you've thought, I could make a spreadsheet for that. You could be using a list in Slack. Now we're going to take a look at how you can create lists, how we add data to them and even see how they can be used for project management. Remember you can follow along with me in your own Slack sandbox. You can even follow along with me in a sandbox. They're free. Anyone can get one on slack.dev. So if you don't have one yet, you know, maybe get on with that before my cat gets one before you do. All right, let's get going. So I'm going to make a list. The easy way to start with that is using files. We'll get into all of the different aspects of files later, but over in your left-hand sidebar, I've got this icon for files. And when I click on that, my left-hand sidebar, instead of listing out a lot of channels, it's going to show me the types of files that I have access to. In this instance, I haven't really set much up. I could choose lists here to just display lists, or when I'm still here on this all files view, I can just jump up to new in the top right corner and choose new list. Now what we're going to get out of this is there's an option down here for exploring templates, which we're going to skip for now. You can also make your own template, which is what this is highlighting. We'll close that for now. And this is going to be our basic list. I'm going to use an example of my team planning an event for the Slack community. And this is entirely made up. None of this is real. So we'll call this Slack community at TDX, because sometimes we do things at TDX, you know. It's nice to have a little description. So we'll use this space right here to put a description. Once we have that, I can just start working on this list. So let's do that. Now we need to add a field. So we can hit this add field button, and it'll display all of the available field types. This is very similar to when you are choosing a data type for a new field in Salesforce. Here I'm going to use what we call a select field. In Salesforce, that'd be called a pick list. So I'm going to choose this. We're going to call this status. Now we are going to set a status of this. I'm going to use some really traditional project management statuses. So how about not started. And I can just hit enter to create a new line. We'll say working, blocked, and done. After I've selected these, I can set a color on them. I like to say that things that aren't started, there may be gray. Things that are working, they can be a green color. How about that jade? That's nice. Blocked, I want that to kind of stand out. We'll make that red. For when things are done, we'll say that's green, but the other color green. We'll say that the default option is not started. We don't need to allow for multiple selections, and then I can save. If I want to be able to see more, I can slide this over, or I can even say that this area on the left should be a little bit smaller. So this is really good, but what if I have some comments on these? I know that since we don't have a budget yet, I'm probably not really going to be able to select a venue or order swag, because we don't know how much money we have. So those items are going to be blocked. But what if I want to put comments on them? I want to be really clear about why they're blocked. So as you'll notice, when I hover over the name, I get this option to open the item. Each row in your list, we are going to call an item. And when I open that, I have the ability to mark it as complete, or add subtasks, or even create fields from this view. In my case, I want to add a comment. And we'll say blocked due to no budget. So now my comment is going to be visible to everybody who comes and looks at the list. That's nice and helpful. I can also see that that comment is there without clicking into the item by seeing the view comment option that shows up, only because I've added that comment. Now you'll notice when I opened the item, there was this big mark complete button. I can click this button here, and it'll check this off, showing that this is done. I don't actually have to open the item. If I need to edit its status as complete, what I can do is check or uncheck any of these options from right here. And you get a nice little animation with that, because it's Slack, and we love you. So now I have my list, but oftentimes, these grow very long. There's a whole lot of things to do. I really need to be able to create different views of this information so that I can actually use it effectively. So let's look at how we can do that. First off, I'll show you searching. If I have an interest in something, maybe I want to see what's blocked, I can start topping, or I can start topping. I can start typing and see that something is blocked, or maybe I want to see, you know, what is assigned to Jillian, or what's assigned to me. Nothing. I love that. So search is really nice. As soon as you start typing, it starts searching, which is really helpful. But we can also do some filtering. So notice here, when I choose filter, I can filter by almost all of the fields. I can't filter off of the name, because you would just search if you were looking for a particular item. So I could choose, let's say I wanted to search by due date. I can choose these relative things or enter a custom filter that the due date is a certain thing. But how about instead of searching or filtering by due date, we filter by status? And I just want to see what's blocked. Once I do that, I have the option of saving this as it is a new view. So when I save this, I'll call it blocked and hit create. Now that I've saved that, I can flip back and forth between that view and the other views that I have. You'll notice when I click over here, my blocked option that I created is here. And then I still I could go back to open, completed, or all items. If you're thinking this looks a lot like the way that a list view works, you'd be right. Of course, I can also sort. Maybe I want to sort these by their date. Again, we have ascending or descending, very standard things. And again, I can save this as blocked sorted. And then again, I have the ability to easily flip between my views. Another thing that I can do is group my fields. When I click here, I come into group. I think this makes the most sense to group by status. So you'll see immediately, I can easily see what's not started. I can see that we're not working on anything. I've got two items blocked and nothing is done yet. It's a very easy way to see this view. But if you've been doing any project management or you've been on large projects, you'll know that the Kanban style is a very easy way to work with this data. So let's choose the board. When we view a Kanban board, it gives us this very traditional view where I've got my columns and I can see the status of everything. And what's nice is like a Kanban board, I can just grab one of these and drag it around. That makes working with this information really, really easy and everybody can see it. Again, I can save this. We'll call this the board view. And so now I have this available. Now what if I want to be able to share this with a bunch of people all at once? That's actually pretty easy. There's two ways we can do it. The first way, I'm going to come up here and see my list actions. With list actions, I can share the list or I can copy a link to the list. I'm going to do that. I'm going to go back to home and I'm going to come into my Slack School channel and I'm going to send a message. I like to take a single word, highlight that, choose this link option, and then paste that link in and hit save. When I do this, I'll get a little pop-up and it says, hey, you're sharing this and here's the default level of sharing. It's editable. I don't really want everyone to edit this. I'd like other people to be able to see it. So I'm going to click can view and then I can hit send. What's nice about this is that by sharing it this way, I've got a simple message. Everybody can go into the Slack School channel and click that and then view the list that I just made. There's another way that I can add a list. If I have a list that's going to be very important to a channel, what I can do is click on the plus here, choose list, find my list, we'll choose the default view. Let's say I want it to be one of the ones that we just created. I'll leave it at all and then I'll hit insert and it'll remind me, do you want everyone to be able to access this? I'll say sure, but we're going to again, we're going to choose can view here and then share. And now I have a new tab so everybody in the channel can see this tab and get into the list really easily. So after a while, once this list moves up and it's a little bit harder to see, folks could just jump right over here and see the list, make comments, do whatever they like to do. Lists have another trick hiding up their sleeve that I really personally love, and that's creating really, really simple automations with very few clicks. So watch this. Let's say I want to know when a status becomes blocked. I can go over here to status and I have this notify me when a field changes. I could send it to a channel or to my own activity feed, and I'm going to send it to a channel. This is actually a very lightweight version of our workflow builder that knows you're trying to automate something from a list, specifically that status field. So I could choose a different field if I wanted. We'll leave it at status for now, and I'll say that when it goes to blocked, you'll notice it updated this bit up here. Then I go to the next screen and it says, what do I want to do? I want to send a notification to how about the Slack school channel, and then I can publish that workflow. It's literally as easy as that. Now when I make an edit and I set something to blocked, we should get a message right here. It's easy and it's fast. There are a couple of things that you need to keep in mind when you're working with lists. The first, you're limited to a thousand rows per list. After that, we need to think of another solution. Lists are non-relational. I can have a list that has a link to another list, but it's just a link. It's not intelligent in the way that a lookup field is. Our permissions for lists are going to be channel based. So I showed you how that works. That's literally how they work. There's nothing more complex than that. We don't have formulas and there isn't a heavy reporting engine that sits on top of this. So if you're trying to create a bunch of reports, lists are probably not the right tool for you. And the last thing to keep in mind is we don't produce an audit log or change history. Well there you have it. Lists are a simple, lightweight tool that really help you get things done. Let me know how it went for you in the comments or jump into the Slack community workspace at slackcommunity.com. Lists in Slack are amazing. Start using them now. Don't forget to like and subscribe. You're awesome. You just go there. Are you going to be cool? Is that actually going to work? It's probably not going to work.