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Not using flashtags in Teams chats? You should be. 

🤔  99 unread messages. Which matter and which don’t?

🤔  A long message about that thing we talked about. Do I need to do something about this?

🤔  So sorry, I must have missed that. When did you share it again??

It's all too much unnecessary thinking and processing in this economy!

Now, I’m a BIG believer in group chat as the open river of team comms that keeps everyone connected and progressing. 

But it’s a jungle out there, so my system is to create ‘tags’ that provide crucial context and also spotlight certain types of messages and then make it easy to group and retrieve them later.

Very much like hashtags, "flashtags", a term coined by Hubspot, do exactly this.

Here’s how it works. 

Choose a set of tags that are meaningful to your team. In one team, ours were:

#done

#blocked

#question

#headsup

#actionfor

You will need to specify and communicate the exact meaning of each of these - so when you see one, you know EXACTLY what it means and what you should do.

Basic use case: Don’t make me think

We’d use tags in the chat to signal exactly what type of message this is so that no one has to waste time doing too much 🤔, like this: 

—

The Value Proposition work is #done and you can find the file here.

—

I’m #blocked on the Product v2 Documentation - can’t get an answer from Marketing. @CarrieGoucher can you help?

—

A #question about the corporate SWOT - do we need our own version or is the generic one enough?

—

A quick #headsup that we have clients in the office tomorrow afternoon.

—

Here’s an #actionfor @AhmedRashid - are you still ok to draft the first version?

—

You’ll see I’ve used the hashtag sign as the tag here. This will work in Teams but not in Slack where # denotes a channel. 

You can use any symbol on the keyboard that you think will work for your team, including %, +, & and even # if it doesn’t already do something different.  

Advanced use case: Search and rescue

We found it saved us lots of time to use tags to summarise content for updates and reports.

Preparing a list of what’s completed this month for a leadership team presentation? Search for #done and you have a list ready to go.

Want to check you’ve captured all your actions? We’d use meeting chat to record actions for ourselves and others using #actionfor and then search for this to pull up a comprehensive list of our own actions.

Looking for ways to improve productivity? Search on #blocked and look for patterns.

Super-advanced use case: Alert me

We would set up alerts so that, for example, I got a notification as soon as #blocked appeared anywhere in selected channels.

We also set up a feed just for e.g. #question which the whole team kept an eye on and replied where they could.

That’s all for this week. Something to play around with? 

Have you used anything like this and how well did it work for you?

Warmly, Carrie

Dr Carrie Goucher
FewerFasterBolder
07769 708490

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References and further reading 

You can access the full FewerFasterBolder bibliography to source links to any references I use in any of my content and programmes.