How To Get Slack To Show You Are In A Meeting

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Collaboration is essential in a virtual work setting, and Slack has been instrumental in facilitating this. A major advantage of using Slack is its function to display your current status, informing your colleagues whether you are free or occupied. In this blog post, we will explain how to set Slack to demonstrate that you are in a meeting.

Set your status manually

One way to show that you are in a meeting is by setting your status manually. Here are the steps to set your status:

  1. Click on your profile picture in the top right corner of Slack.
  2. Select ‘Set a status’.
  3. Choose a predefined status or create your own.
  4. If you’re creating your own, type your status into the ‘What’s your status?’ box (for example, ‘In a meeting’).
  5. If you want, set a time for the status to clear.
  6. Click ‘Save’.

Automating your status with calendar integration

A more consistent way to show that you are in a meeting is by integrating your calendar with Slack. This way, whenever you have a meeting scheduled in your calendar, your status in Slack will automatically update.

To do this, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Click on ‘Apps’ in the left sidebar.
  2. Search for ‘Google Calendar’ or ‘Outlook Calendar’, depending on what you use.
  3. Follow the instructions to install and connect your calendar.
  4. Once connected, go to the app settings and enable the ‘Automatically update my status based on my calendar’ option.

With this, every time you have a meeting scheduled, your status will automatically show ‘In a meeting’.

Using scripts to automate your status

If you are comfortable with programming, you can automate your status using the Slack API and a script. Here is a simple Python script to update your status:

    import slack
    import os

    token = os.getenv('SLACK_TOKEN')
    client = slack.WebClient(token)

    response = client.users_profile_set(
        profile={
            "status_text": "In a meeting",
            "status_emoji": ":calendar:",
        }
    )

In the above script, replace ‘SLACK_TOKEN’ with your actual Slack token. This will update your status to ‘In a meeting’ with the calendar emoji.

In conclusion, whether manually, through calendar integration, or using scripts, Slack offers various ways to show that you are in a meeting, allowing for better collaboration within your team.