How to Keep Slack Active All Day, Hour by Hour

Our guide on how to keep Slack active compares tools. People keep searching for a narrower thing, which is how to stay green for a whole workday without buying anything, so here's a normal day with the spots where the dot drops.

Slack's help page says you're set to away after 10 minutes of desktop inactivity, or when you leave or close the mobile app. Nobody can change that number, admins included.

9:00, the easy part

You open the laptop, Slack launches, and you read overnight messages, so the dot is green already. While you're here:

• Check that you aren't manually set to away from yesterday. Click your profile picture. If it says Set yourself as active, click it. A manual away sticks overnight and survives restarts.
• Open Slack on your phone once, so the app is signed in and current for lunch and the commute.

10:00, heads-down work

This is where most people go away for the first time. You're in an editor or a spreadsheet, and Slack is behind three other windows.

What works is a second screen with Slack on it, and a habit of glancing over between tasks. If you only have the laptop screen, snap Slack to a narrow strip on one side. Clicking in it now and then is enough, even if you don't read anything.

I'd avoid setting a timer to poke Slack every nine minutes. It's a lot of interruptions for a status dot.

11:00, meetings

Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls don't count as Slack activity. An hour-long call means roughly 50 minutes of showing away.

I wouldn't fight this one. Connect Slack to Google Calendar or Outlook and it sets an "In a meeting" status automatically, and I think a hollow dot with that status beside it answers "you there?" better than a green dot would. If you do need the dot itself green, leave the Slack phone app open next to the keyboard during the call, or take the call in a Slack huddle if your team is fine with that, since huddles count as activity.

12:30, lunch

Showing away at lunch is fine. If you'd still like to stay green, say because you're eating at your desk and reading, the phone is the tool. Unlock it, open Slack, and leave it open. The moment you switch to another app or lock the screen, Slack treats that as leaving, and you're away almost immediately. As far as I can tell from the help page, mobile gets no ten-minute grace period, and keeping Slack active on mobile goes into the settings that help.

2:00, the laptop goes to sleep

You step away for coffee, the display sleeps after five minutes, the machine follows, and Slack loses its connection. You come back to a hollow dot and a "you around?" from 2:14.

The power settings for that:

An awake laptop with nobody touching it still hits the 10-minute timer, so this only removes the sleep disconnect. Why Slack goes idle so quickly has more on that.

5:30, laptop closed

Once the laptop is closed your dot goes hollow within a minute or so. If you're on call, or your team is three time zones west and their afternoon is your evening, the choices get narrow: the phone app open in your hand (not practical on a bike), or something that holds your Slack session open from a machine that isn't your laptop.

We build one of those. Slack Green keeps your presence active on a schedule you pick, laptop closed, with a free tier that covers up to two hours at a stretch. It needs your Slack session token to do that, same as every tool of this type, and the token page explains what that token can do.

What I'd do with all this

Second monitor and the power settings. Those two cost nothing, take ten minutes to set up, and cover the 10:00 and 2:00 drops, which I'd guess are the bulk of it for anyone with a desk job. Meetings get the calendar status. I'd leave lunch alone, and I'd only bother with the 5:30 problem if someone on the team really does need to see you as reachable in the evening.