How to Set Your Slack Status to Active (and Why It Flips Back)

Click your profile picture, then Set yourself as active. That's it on desktop.

The catch shows up about ten minutes later, when the dot goes hollow again and you wonder if the button did anything at all. It did. It just doesn't do what most people assume it does.

Steps for each device

Slack's own status and availability help page lists the same two options everywhere, just in slightly different spots.

If the menu says Set yourself as away instead, you're already active. Slack only ever shows the option you're not currently in, which confused me for longer than I'd like to admit.

What the button actually changes

It clears a manual "away." Nothing more.

Slack has two ways to put you away. One is you picking Set yourself as away, and that sticks until you switch it back. The other is automatic: 10 minutes with no activity on desktop, or leaving the app on your phone. Pressing Set yourself as active undoes the first kind and puts you back on automatic mode. The automatic timer keeps running underneath, so if you walk off to make coffee, you'll be away again before the kettle boils.

Slack's developer docs are blunt about this. Apps can set a user to auto or away, and there's "no way to force a user status to active" (from the presence and status docs). If the API can't pin you to active, the menu button can't either.

Can you set it to always active?

Not from inside Slack. There's no setting for it, no admin toggle, no paid-plan perk. People search "set slack status to always active" a lot, and the honest answer is that anything promising it works by keeping Slack busy for you in one way or another, whether that's a window you never close or a tool poking your session every few minutes. Some options:

• Leave Slack open and in front on a machine you're actually using. Free, works while you're at the desk. Useless during a long doc review in another window.
• A mouse jiggler or a keep-awake app. Mixed. Slack mostly cares about activity inside its own window, so a lot of these don't do much (the Caffeine test shows why).
• A tool that refreshes your presence through Slack's session on a schedule. This is the only kind that holds with your laptop shut.

There's a longer rundown of each in how to keep Slack active, with what breaks and when.

Active status isn't your custom status

Quick one, because it trips people up. The green dot is presence. The emoji and text next to your name ("In a meeting", "🟢 Working") is a custom status, and it doesn't touch the dot at all. You can have a green circle emoji and a hollow dot at the same time, which honestly looks a bit silly. The two are laid out side by side in what Slack active status means.

If it keeps flipping back while you work

Usually one of three things. You're working in another app and Slack can't see it. Your phone app went to the background and that device reported you away. Or the desktop app is sleeping because of OS power settings. If the dot turns hollow while you're typing in Slack itself, that's a different bug, and this troubleshooting post goes through it.

For the "I'm working, just not in Slack" case, we built Slack Green to keep the dot green during the hours you pick, without a jiggler running on your laptop. But try the free stuff first. For a lot of people, keeping the Slack window open on a second monitor is enough.