Automating your Slack status. Why would you want to do that? Well for one thing it stops people asking what you’re up to. Actually that’s the only reason to do it.

I recently went remote, work from home, the whole shebang. Nice.

One of the first problems we discovered with this however was that it wasn’t really possible to see what I am working on. Not in the micro-manage screenshot every 5 minutes sense but a general gist. The way I worked around this was to tie in my Slack status to display what I was doing. Lets jump in!

You will need

Zapier
Everhour.. or Harvest, or Toggl, or some form of time tracking that integrates with;
Basecamp.. or Asana, or Jira, or something else that integrates with the time tracker you picked
Slack (Duh)

Set it up

Time tracker integration (Everhour and Basecamp in my case)

This one I’m not going to be so much help with. I personally use Everhour and Basecamp. You use whatever you’re using, the key point is that you need to be able to start and stop timers that includes the title of the task you’re working on.

Zapier setup

If you’re a smart cookie you’ll only need this screenshot to set it all up. So here it is. Get on it champ.

Yes. In this you’ll need a paid Zapier account. Get your employer to pay for it or something. No I’ve not figured out a decent way to make it work without the multi-step zaps.

If you do figure out a way to do this free, please do blog about it and send me the link - I’ll give you some shoutouts here!

Choose Everhour as the starting trigger, with a trigger event of a timer starting