Slack Channels for Separating Project Conversations

Why I started separating project chats

It was honestly out of survival. Picture this: I had one giant Slack channel with about a dozen people from different projects. Someone would ask a quick formatting question about a blog post and ten messages later someone else would be deep in a thread about API endpoints. The conversations piled on top of each other like a messy comment section that no one could follow. Half the time I came back from lunch and felt like I had missed an entire season of a TV show. 😛

The breaking point came when I searched for a decision we had made about a newsletter redesign. I typed what I thought was the right phrase into Slack search, got a few semi-related memes, and then silence. I knew we had decided, but it had been buried under a totally different discussion hours later. That was the moment I started setting up separate project channels, even though at first it felt like over-organizing.

How I actually created my first channels

The first step was embarrassingly simple. I clicked the little plus sign next to “Channels” in Slack. A small window popped up and it asked for a name. This part turns out more important than I thought. If you just name it “marketing” or “design,” you will regret it in about three weeks. I learned fast that project-specific names save you from scrolling. Instead of “design,” I went with “website-redesign-2024.”

On the privacy setting, I kept most open so new teammates could jump in without needing an invite. I only made them private when sensitive chatter came up, like budgets. Immediately after setting up, I pinned key docs. That’s another thing beginners always miss. In each channel, hit the little thumbtack icon at the upper right and add links or notes. That way the onboarding document is always at the top instead of hidden somewhere in an email from last month.

Separating by project rather than by team

At first I assumed channels should match departments. So there’d be “marketing,” “engineering,” and “support.” That sounds clean but falls apart quick. A single marketing project can be wildly different from another. One day you’re talking about a podcast ad, and the next day launching a webinar. When both happen in one room, everyone’s sanity disappears.

So instead I flipped it. I created channels based on projects, like “webinar-march-launch” or “support-faq-rebuild.” Suddenly people were actually reading messages meant for them. If someone wasn’t working on the webinar, they never even had to join that channel. The difference in noise level was night and day. It’s the difference between trying to hold multiple family holidays in one living room versus splitting them into different houses.

How threaded replies became my accidental savior

Even with projects split out, messages still turn into jumble if people just pile responses inline. What I begged my teammates to do was reply in threads. This means instead of typing right under the main message, you click “Reply in thread” and keep that conversation tucked away. At first it feels hidden because you have to click to open, but for long conversations it’s a blessing.

One real case: we were arguing about the exact slogan on a landing page. Twenty different rewrites got thrown into one thread. Meanwhile the rest of the channel stayed readable and unblocked. Compare that to before when I had nine slogans mixed with someone asking if the Zoom call was recorded. Now it feels like conversations stay in clearly labeled drawers.

When channels get too quiet or too loud

This is the weird part you never expect. Sometimes you make a channel and almost nobody talks in it. Like we had one for a side campaign and after the first week it turned into a ghost town. On the other side, the “all-staff” one never shuts up because people ask random tool questions in there. Slack lets you control this a little. You can mute channels you don’t need. There’s a mute button in the details panel on the right, and when you click it, that channel still exists but no longer screams for your attention.

Notification settings are also your friend. You can tone it down to only alert when someone mentions your name. That way you don’t get woken up by chatter about swag designs if you aren’t even on that project.

Pinning templates to reduce repeating yourself

Here’s a little time saver I discovered by accident. In many projects you’re repeating the same instructions. Like “Here’s how to upload a case study” or “These are the specs for banner images.” Instead of pasting over and over, I started pinning templates right in the channel. I just wrote one Slack message with the full checklist and then pinned it so newcomers could find it instantly.

Later I realized you can also link out directly to shared docs. If the team is mostly storing things in Google Docs, then just pin the Doc link. It sounds silly, but when you do this consistently each project channel basically carries its own little starter kit. New people joining don’t need a private walkthrough anymore.

Using naming conventions that make sense

I have lost hours searching for the right Slack channel because half my names were inconsistent. Some had hyphens, some didn’t. Some started with “project-” while others didn’t. That bit me badly when I typed “redesign” and Slack didn’t show me the right thing because I had written “websiteupdate” without a space. Now I always use dashes between words and try to start with the bigger category first, like “web-marketing-video-April.”

Think of it like labeling folders on your computer. If the names are random, you will curse yourself trying to find things three months later. A tiny bit of discipline saves hours later. The trick is to get everyone on board with it, though. If only one person does it, the rest just create chaos anyway. That part took some gentle teammate nagging 🙂

Archiving channels when the project ends

Slack gets cluttered fast if you never close things down. I had channels just sitting there from two years ago, full of dead links and broken deadlines. It got depressing to scroll by them. Then I learned about archiving. When a project wraps, click channel details, then archive. It doesn’t delete anything, but it removes the channel from the active list. If someone really needs to dig back, it can be unarchived.

The mental effect was huge. Suddenly my Slack felt manageable. I could look at the sidebar and only see living projects. When things end, they politely go to storage. That closure feels good in a way I didn’t expect.

Why this matters in real daily work

The whole thing comes down to being able to actually find stuff when you need it. Without project channels, Slack turns into white noise. With them, each project is its own little island. Decisions, links, brainstorming, even the silly jokes live in one place. If you need to know later what was decided on the callout box color for that landing page, you know exactly where to look.

It’s one of those fixes you resist because it feels like more overhead. But after living through the chaos of giant general channels, splitting stuff out has saved me from hours of scrolling and basically losing my mind. More than once I’ve been able to pull a past decision straight from a dedicated project channel and look surprisingly competent in front of my boss ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And no, I don’t always stick to my own rules—there’s still a half finished channel sitting there called “test-automation-who-knows”—but at least the messiest parts have finally been sorted.