Tech finally made the world a better place.
Slack, the messaging platform used by organizations ranging from the MTA to SoftBank, quietly released a new feature in late June that’s set to forever change the remote-work game: scheduled messages. Because whether or not Slack intended it, scheduled messages are perfect for tricking your boss into thinking you’re working. (Or for the less devious among us, just not bugging your co-workers after hours.)
As the name suggests, the feature lets you compose and schedule a message to be posted in a Slack channel of your choosing at a later date. Most importantly for our purposes, once sent the message looks exactly the same as any other message — giving no indication that it was scheduled in advance.
The possibilities are wondrous.
Picture it: It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, the sun is blazing, and you’re at the beach soaking in those rays. But thanks to scheduled messages, as far as your boss can tell you’re hard at work dropping pitch ideas into the #Brainstorm channel.
Combine that with a handy little trick which keeps your Slack status bubble green, and you’re a nonstop working machine in the eyes of your corporate overlords.
We’re clearly not the only ones who can’t wait to, ahem, use this feature to its fullest potential.
“Everyone’s saying slack scheduled messages promote work life balance by sending messages during working hours but I’m going to use them to send messages in the middle of the night so it looks like I’m always working,” wrote Nick Morgan, whose Twitter profile identifies him as a backend engineer at Twitter.
“Nah you got to use them to make it look like you’re working while taking a nap,” replied another self-identified Twitter employee Justin Anderson.
Others, perhaps hesitant to put themselves on blast, merely hinted at some vague mischievousness in their future.
Because let’s be real: While some may welcome the scheduled messages feature as the bland productively tool it’s surely intended to be, we all know what many Slack users will do with it.
SEE ALSO: How to keep your Slack status active while *ahem* ‘working’ from home
See you at the beach.
