Turning Slack Into Your Own Personal Hypeman With a Few Key Hacks
Improving Morale With a Winbot That Reminds You of Personal Wins and Accomplishments
One of the plights I’ve struggled with in my career is the idea of hedonic adaptation. From our good friend Wikipedia:
“Hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.”
Put simply, I move the goalposts on myself. I get a win and I’m already on to the next game. This can be a great trait to have if you want to achieve more, but it can be toxic towards your mental health. That’s why I wanted to find a way to automate reminders that could put my wins into perspective and remind me of the progress I’ve made to improve my mood.
I’m going to turn a Slack bot into my own personal hype man.
This is actually comprised of three discrete automations, all of which serve different functions to accomplish this goal. Let’s dive into it.
Setting Up a Slack Winbot to Collect Your Weekly Wins
The first thing I had to do was set up a Slackbot that could collect my wins on a weekly basis and categorize them. Not too hard. Hopped over to Workflow Builder to design a timed action to send a form.
Once I told my “Winbot” to message me every Friday at 4 pm, I built out a simple form that I could fill out quickly. No one likes homework at the end of the day on Friday…
I wanted my first question to be binary in nature so I could easily filter out weeks where I didn’t get any big wins and for my own data purposes… How often do I perceive myself as “winning?” That’s an interesting data point.
Next, I had a long text field describing the win. Easy breezy, but I want a way to denote what wins were HUGE and what wins were minor. Let’s build a tiered system.
Sweet, now I’m capturing the weight of each win so I can reflect back on what I thought mattered in one snapshot of time. That will be interesting and helpful later.
Finally, I wanted to add one more long answer textbox for supplemental wins. These may not have been my biggest wins on the week, but I still want to catalog them.
Collecting These Wins to Automate Your Career Development Documentation
This bot is cool, now I want it to be useful. The key application I care about for this next step is documenting accomplishments. It’s so important to document your own accomplishments on a routine basis, but if you’re anything like me, it probably falls on the backburner pretty routinely. Life gets in the way, you’re happy in your job, and you’re not thinking about resume bullet points right now.
That’s why I wanted this bot to automate the entire process. To do this, we’ll need to get out of Slack and incorporate another tool. I automated this using Google Sheets.
As long as your organization allows you to install third party apps for Slack, this should be easy. You may need to ask your admin for permission to install Google Sheets, but installing something from a reputable source like Google shouldn’t be an issue in most organizations.
Once you’ve installed Google Sheets into Slack, you’ll want to go into your Google Drive and create a new spreadsheet that has columns that match your questions. Share this Google doc with your personal Gmail so you always have access to it.
From there, we’ll add an action to the Slack workflow we built earlier that instructs it to add a row to a Google Sheet. We’ll play the fun matching game where we line up the right data with the right column, and next thing you know, this bot will be automatically adding our wins and accomplishments to a spreadsheet every week so we can reference them later.
The practical benefits of this for me are huge… I don’t need to worry about forgetting key accomplishments, I have a deep reservoir of wins to pull from in future career situations, and all of this is automated and documented so I have access to it forever, even if I lost my job.
Pretty cool, but I think we can do more with this…
Building a Bot That Hypes You Every Week
All of this is very practical and useful, but I originally set out to do this because I wanted to improve my morale. Now it’s time to rope in one more tool so we can turn this document into a hype machine that can remind me I’m a bad ass every week.
I’m going to use Zapier to remind me of these wins later on. This is a classic hedonic adaptation problem… I get a win that feels huge in January, but by March, that’s the new baseline. I lose perspective and miss the growth I’m experiencing. I want to solve for that… Let’s say I want to be reminded a month later about these wins. I might build a workflow that looks something like this…
Create a Zap where the trigger event is a new row being added to my career documentation spreadsheet
Add a delay for, let’s call it 25 days. I don’t want this notification coming exactly four weeks later, because I don’t want it on a Friday afternoon. Using it to overcome mid-week blues is a good solution for me.
Have it perform the action “Send a Direct Message” in Slack to myself
Use a combination of static and dynamic text to craft a message that will motivate me
Sample Message From My Winbot
Hey Tim!
Hope you’re having a great week. I know things get busy and hectic, so I wanted to take a minute for you to pause, reflect, and remember the wins you’re getting. It’s important to remember you’re making progress, so let’s do a quick win recap.
A month ago, you shared this win with me…
[INSERT VARIABLE TEXT HERE <- This is where we’ll insert our long text answer from our win]
When I asked you how big of a deal this was, you ranked it as a [INSERT VARIABLE TEXT HERE <- This is where we’ll insert our 1-5 ranking selection]
I want you to take 3-5 minutes to reflect on that win… How does it feel now? What has happened in the past month if you didn’t do this? What can you do to double-down on this win this week?
This not only reminds me of wins I got a month ago, many of which I’ve probably forgotten about, but it also prompts me to reflect on the past month. I enjoy this as a brief reset, especially during the middle of the week when things can get a little crazy.
But wait… I think I can make this more fun…
Adding More Fun With GIPHY
Okay, I love that we’ve automated my career documentation and that I’ll be getting helpful reminders to prompt me to reflect. This is already having a positive impact on my mental wellbeing, but it’s not that fun. Winning is supposed to be fun.
Let’s go back to Zapier and add one more quick automation for the road.
I want to set up a GIPHY automation to respond with a “Winning” GIF every time the phrase “win recap” is included in that channel. That’s a narrow term that’s only being used by this one automated message, so I should have false positives that cause it to fire.
This is actually SUPER easy. There’s a simple cookbook you can follow from Zapier here to accomplish this exact goal.
Now I feel like we’ve really cooked up something special.
I’m documenting my career progress every week in a document that I’ll always have access to.
I’m reflecting every week on my accomplishments and preventing hedonic adaptation from moving the goalposts on me.
I’m getting a fun GIF shared with me every week reflecting on these wins.
This is the power that Slack can have, and it’s only one very narrow use case.
Slack is one of the most powerful collaboration tools in the world, but the vast majority of organizations are only using a fraction of its functionality. In a situation where we could be augmenting our leaders with world-class automated assistants, we instead use these same tools to fragment their attention and distract them with questions about minutiae.
I’m excited to be a part of forging the future with forward-thinking clients who see the work world differently. If you want to learn more about how we can use Slack to multiply your impact as a leader and reduce the distractions you have in your digital workplace, email me at tim@yourremoteworkcoach.com. I’d love to dive in with you.
Tim Hickle is a marketing leader who helps high-growth startups and scale-ups get unstuck and hit their goals while embracing AI and the future of work. To learn more about how Tim can help your organization grow, visit TimHickle.com