Set Your Slack Status From Apple Shortcuts: A Working Shortcut, Tested

Apple Shortcuts has no "set Slack status" action on the Mac: Slack's desktop app 4.52.171 ships no App Intents, the files that give an app Shortcuts actions. What works is the Get Contents of URL action, which can send a POST request to Slack's users.profile.set method with your user token. We built that shortcut on 5 October 2026 on macOS 26.5.2, ran it against our free-plan test workspace, and it set ":headphones: Deep work" for exactly 60 minutes. The whole run took 4.5 seconds from Terminal.

What you need first

• • A Slack app in your workspace with the user scope users.profile:write, installed to your account. Installing gives you a user token that starts with xoxp-. A bot token (xoxb-) is refused: users.profile.set answered our bot token with {"ok": false, "error": "not_allowed_token_type"}.
• • The Shortcuts app on a Mac, iPhone or iPad. We built and ran the shortcut on a Mac only.

The token goes into the shortcut as plain text. Anyone you share the shortcut file with gets your token, so do not share it, and revoke the token if you do by mistake. Creating the app and the token is covered in our Slack bot token guide.

The shortcut, action by action

Slack wants the expiry as a Unix time in seconds. Shortcuts has no "Unix time" format, so the first three actions build one: the number of seconds since 1 January 1970, plus 3,600.


• Date: set it to Specified Date and type 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z.
• Get Time Between Dates: unit Seconds, between Date and Current Date.
• Calculate: Time Between Dates + 3600 (60 minutes; use 1800 for 30).
• Get Contents of URL: URL https://slack.com/api/users.profile.set, Method POST.
- Headers: key Authorization, value Bearer xoxp-your-token. - Request Body: JSON, with one key profile of type Dictionary holding: - status_text (Text): Deep work - status_emoji (Text): :headphones: - status_expiration (Number): the Calculation Result variable

Shortcuts added the last action, Stop and output, on its own when we opened the shortcut. The JSON body the shortcut sent is the same one a script would send:

{"profile": {"status_text": "Deep work", "status_emoji": ":headphones:", "status_expiration": 1791188855}}

What happened when we ran it

From Terminal, shortcuts run "SG Deep work" finished in 4.51 seconds, and our watcher saw the new status through users.profile.get 0.46 seconds after the command started. Slack's web app showed it in the profile menu:



Slack's reply to the shortcut was {"ok": true, "warning": "missing_charset", ...} followed by the whole profile. The warning is harmless: Shortcuts sends Content-Type: application/json without charset=utf-8, and Slack set the status anyway. The reply also contains your profile fields, so do not show it in a notification you might screenshot.

The expiry came out right. The status we set at Unix time 1791185255 had status_expiration 1791188855, exactly 3,600 seconds later, and Slack clears a status at its expiration time on its own. Clicking the shortcut's tile in the Shortcuts app ran it the same way.

Not every Terminal run was clean. In 7 runs of our two shortcuts with shortcuts run, 3 did not return within 40 to 60 seconds. Two of those three had already done their job (the status was set, the message was posted) and the third had sent nothing. If you call shortcuts from a script, add a timeout and check the result in Slack.

A second shortcut that posts a message

To post a message instead of setting a status, use an incoming webhook. It needs no token header: the webhook URL is the secret, and it posts to one channel.

Our first run took 9.9 seconds and returned the plain text ok. The message arrived in the channel as the app:

Treat the webhook URL like the token. Anyone who has the shortcut can post to that channel.

Running it automatically

Shortcuts on macOS 26 and iOS can run a shortcut from a personal automation, such as when a Focus turns on. We did not set one up, because toggling Focus would have changed the state of the Mac we were testing on. If you want your status tied to Focus, Slack's own automatic statuses can follow focus mode in Slack, and our automatic Slack status guide has three macOS triggers we timed. A status does not change your green or away dot; Slack Green handles the dot, separately from any status.

FAQ

Can I clear my Slack status with a shortcut?

Yes. Send the same request with status_text and status_emoji set to empty text and status_expiration set to 0. That is the call our test scripts used to clear the status after each run.

Does this work on the Slack free plan?

Yes. Our test workspace is on the Free plan.