What are Slack Lists? How to use it to organize work?

What are Slack Lists and how do they work?

Slack Lists is a feature primarily aimed at task management. Lists helps turn Slack from a messaging app into a basic productivity tool that can help keep track of more structured data.

If you're familiar with databases in Notion, you'll find Slack Lists easy to understand and use. Each List is a highly configurable group of items. For example, you can add fields to the List so that they can be used to attach priority levels to received messages.

You can also add comments to List items, separate from other Slack messages. This can help promote focused discussion while keeping main channels less cluttered and useful to a broader group.

What can you do with Lists?

The built-in templates give some ideas of what you can do using Lists. These include:

1. Project tracker.
2. Quarterly planning.
3. Request for help.
4. Error tracking.

List is a flexible collection of items that you can tailor by defining your own fields and designing custom views. For example, project trackers can use items that have a priority field with star rating, assignee, and due date. You can group such tasks by status and filter them by priority to focus on those that need to be done urgently.

But Lists are not too heavy. You can add any message to the List, so it's a great way to keep track of important details. Use a group as a common messaging group and you'll never lose important Slack conversations again.

How to create a List and add items to it

List functionality is gradually rolling out to all Slack users and may vary between Workspaces.

Create List

Follow these steps to set up your own List:

1. Select More > Lists from the side menu.
2. On the Lists page , click the + New List button .

Tip : By default, this will set up a new blank List but you can also select one of the many templates from the left menu and click Use Template to create a list.

Add item

When List opens, you can:

1. Click + Add item at the bottom of the List to add a new blank row.
2. Click the + Add Item button at the bottom right of the List window to add a new item using the form interface.

You can also add any message to the List as a new item:

1. Locate the message you want to add to the List.
2. From the floating menu, select Add to list .
3. Select an existing list, then click Add or Create New List .

Customize a Slack List

By default, Lists are great for simple message tracking and templates for many common situations. However, you can adapt List to a variety of situations by adding your own fields and setting up views to display List data.

How to add and define a field

To add your own field to an existing List, follow these steps:

1. Open List.
2. Click the + (Add field) icon in the top left of the table.
3. Enter a name and select a field type.
4. You can define additional fields based on the selected type.

How to change List view

To change an existing List view:

1. Click the icon of three sliders in a column.
2. Switch Layout between Table and Board for two main views.
3. Click other options - like Filter or Group by - to change how the List is displayed.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 08 July 2024