Article
How to keep Slack showing as active
Slack's green dot follows your keyboard and pointer, not your work. There are four ways to keep it green while you're away from the keys. Here's what each one actually asks of you.
The short answer
Slack shows you as active for as long as it sees your computer being used. To keep the dot green while you're away from the keyboard you have four options: set yourself as active by hand, stop your computer sleeping, leave a status message saying where you are, or run a small app that keeps the computer awake for you. Setting yourself active is free and instant, but you have to keep doing it. The app is the one that holds for a whole morning.
Why Slack turns you Away
Slack's dot is a guess about whether you're at your desk, and the only evidence it has is your keyboard and pointer. Go a stretch without touching either and the green dot clears. Locking your screen or letting the computer sleep does it straight away. A pen doesn't count. An hour of careful reading looks exactly like an hour at lunch.
Set yourself as active
Click your picture in Slack, then "Set yourself as active". The dot goes green immediately. It's free and it takes a second.
The catch is that you have to notice you've gone Away before you can fix it, and it doesn't survive your computer locking or sleeping. Fine for a short stretch. Across a whole morning you'll get tired of it.
Stop your computer sleeping
In your computer's power or lock-screen settings you can lengthen the time before the screen locks and the machine sleeps. That fixes the sudden drop that happens the moment a computer goes to sleep. On its own it isn't enough. Nothing is being typed, so Slack still drifts you to Away, and you've now left your screen unlocked for longer, which may not suit a shared office.
Leave a status message
Set a custom status such as "On paper at my desk. Ping me, I'll see it". Anyone who reads it knows exactly where you are, and it costs nothing. That's the catch, really: most people glance at the dot and never read the words next to it.
Let an app hold it open
The dot stays green while Slack sees activity, so that's what Ticking Along provides. While it's on, it keeps your computer awake and moves your pointer a hair's width every few minutes, then puts it straight back where it was. You won't see it happen. You start it before you sit down with your paperwork, and it stops at the time you picked, or at the end of the office hours you set. Nothing is left running afterwards.
Which one should you use?
For ten minutes with a printout, "Set yourself as active" is genuinely all you need, and you shouldn't pay for anything. It's when the same handwritten afternoon comes round every week that clicking it back over and over starts to wear thin. Set office hours once and you can stop thinking about your dot at all.
Teams behaves the same way on a shorter clock: how to keep Teams showing as available. If you want the detail on what Slack is actually watching, we wrote about why Slack marks you Away while you read.