Delaying Slack messages with timy

Data Management
#1

Disclaimer: this is informational, I am not telling you what to do,

A general issue that has become a bigger problem in our work-from-home era is this: more people are working outside traditional office hours as they are trying to juggle childcare, surrendering to feral biorhythms or trying to match day/nightwork at the summit. So it’s 7am or 8pm or whatever and Slack is chirping and a question I find myself asking is “will this person who just atted-me really benefit from a quick reply or will it wait for later/tomorrow and they only atted me to make sure I see their message”? This can make it hard for some folks (especially team leads who are clearing houses) to tune their notifications so that they can unplug while still being reachable. Personally, my pulse goes up at the Slack chime, even if when I look the notification starts with “FYI” :slight_smile:

An effective solution is to time-delay the delivery of Slack messages when you want to at-somebody out of hours but have no need for their immediate attention. There are a number of plugins that do this, and we have made the most economical of these, timy (Pro), available to all users of the LSSTC Slack workspace.

This makes two new commands available to you:

  • /send
    This is the quick way of time shifting with a one-shot message that I use for the problem described above. You can use an absolute or relative time within the coming 24 hour window, eg

          /send Does anyone have a pretty screenshot for the monthly report? 
      @ksk how about something from your demo? at 9am

    You will get a confirmation back showing you what has been scheduled, have an opportunity to delete it, etc.

  • /schedule

    For anything more complicated (further in the future, different timezones, recurring messages etc.) you can use the /schedule command which will put up a set of choices for you:

    /schedule @here Reminder: no LSP Ops meeting today

    will give you these options to fill in:

    Screenshot of Slack (2020-06-17, 15-59-29)
    Screenshot of Slack (2020-06-17, 15-59-29)932×1084 99.8 KB

There is also a webapp you can use if you don’t want to remember the commands.
For how to access that and more information, type /timy help on your direct message or channel of choice, and comment below if you have any questions.

9 Likes
#2

Can you speak to how safe it is to install/authorize timy?

timy :heart: you, but needs your help!
Some additional user permissions are needed to send messages on behalf of you.
This means each one of your workspace members will have to install timy separately to get user specific permissions.
Don’t worry, This won’t take a minute :blush:

When someone tells me not to worry, my first reaction is to worry :slight_smile:

#3

It might also be useful to note that Slackbot (built-in) has a /remind command that takes a person or channel, a message, and a time (which can be recurring). https://slack.com/help/articles/208423427-Set-a-reminder

#4

Actually, I can answer my own question:

Personal information

By using timy, you will provide us with following information to give you the required services and they are mandatory to have.

  • Slack user email
  • Slack user ID
  • Slack team ID
  • Slack workspace name

All the other data you see anywhere inside Slack™ or in one of our websites are processed on the fly and we don’t store them anywhere inside our servers. Above required data fields are necessary to give you a better service.

App data

While using timy, you will send messages through timy. All messages you enter into timy remains yours, and we are committed to ensure that your data is kept safe and confidential. We do not copy or clone your documents in any way. timy does store some data on our servers since he needs to schedule your messages. All your messages are encrypted in a user specific way and once messages are delivered or canceled all the message data is deleted from the servers and cannot be recovered.

#5

Psychologically, I personally hate to use /remind as a timer because I am like “what do you mean you are reminding me, you never told me in the first place” but I’m just weird. By all means people/teams should do what works for them.

#6

PSA: if you type up a long message and try to send it with Timy, having never used Timy before, it seems to completely forget about that message when it asks you for authorization, requiring it to be typed in again :slightly_frowning_face:. Authorize in advance, and copy what you want to schedule to the clipboard first!