Why Slack shows you away
Slack’s servers watch for activity from your client. If they see none for around ten minutes, you are marked away automatically. On a phone, leaving the app also sets you to away. You can set yourself away by hand too, and that setting stays until you change it back.
Ways people try to stay active
- Moving the mouse or using a keep-awake app: works only while your computer is on and awake.
- Leaving Slack open on a spare device: depends on that device staying on and connected.
- Setting your status by hand: you have to remember, and it isn’t the same as being shown active.
- A cloud schedule: a service holds a connection for you during the hours you pick, so it works with your laptop closed.
How Stayslit does it
You connect Slack once from Chrome on a computer. Stayslit stores the session encrypted and, only during your schedule, keeps a connection open the way a signed-in Slack client does. Outside your schedule it requests Away, even with Slack open on another device. Manual changes take priority until they expire or you return to schedule.
You can pause it in one tap, take a 15, 30 or 60-minute break, and it respects it if you set yourself to away by hand.
Set it up in three steps
- Create your account and connect Slack.
- Choose your days, hours and an optional lunch break.
- Close the laptop. Check the status screen whenever you like.