Slack’s Elizabeth Kinsey On 5 Ways To Create a Healthy Relationship With Screens and Technology

As a part of my series about 5 Ways To Create a Healthy Relationship With Screens and Technology, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Kinsey.

Elizabeth Kinsey is the Director, Community at Slack, where she leads Slack Community groups and the Slack Community workspace — a place for Slack beginners, experts, developers, designers, and more to share their expertise and learn from each other about the ways they’ve customized Slack, share what they’ve built, learn about new platform releases, and more. She works closely with Slack’s product, marketing and customer experience teams to connect Slack users with each other and with Slack. Prior to joining Slack, Elizabeth was a marketing director at Branch, where she focused on strategy and management of the global field marketing, community, marketing operations and growth/conversion teams.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your backstory?

I’m the Director of Community at Slack, where I lead Slack Community groups and the Slack Community workspace — a place for Slack beginners, experts, developers and designers to share their expertise and learn from each other about the ways they’ve customized Slack, share what they’ve built, learn about new platform releases and more. I work closely with Slack’s product, marketing and customer experience teams to connect Slack users with each other and with Slack. Before joining the Slack team, I worked in marketing at Branch, where I oversaw strategy and management of the global field marketing, community, marketing operations and growth/conversion teams.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Before 2020, I traveled a lot for work: to community meetups, industry conferences and other Slack offices. It was a fantastic way to understand the pulse of our community and meet folks who could be leaders in our user group program. I met one such leader at a conference in Berlin in 2019 who went on to lead our Amsterdam chapter. Cut to 2021 when we were deep in the throes of the pandemic, and we were working on a video about our community leads and the way being part of the community enhanced their experience with Slack. After a series of lockdowns, border closures and other unexpected events, we ended up shifting our film location to Iceland and I was able to travel there and meet up with her (and one other community leader) again. It was the first time any of us had traveled since the start of the pandemic, and I think we were all just wide-eyed with wonder at where we were. We filmed in some stunningly beautiful locations, and it was just so interesting and incredible to me that we’d met in Berlin and there we were two years later standing in front of a massive waterfall on the geologic border between North America and Europe, all because of Slack! (This is the video we ended up making!)

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?

Yes! It’s been a really exciting few years at Slack and for the Slack Community. We’re very focused on helping companies and workers in this era of digital-first work and giving them the tools to thrive in any environment. The Slack Community plays an important part of that initiative because their input and experiences with Slack have such an impact on how we develop and design features and functionalities so our users can do their best work. Right now, we’re making investments to strengthen our programs and communities so we can solidify their role and involvement in Slack’s transformation into an automation platform for work. This is more important than ever as businesses are running on thousands of different tools and services, leaving employees like you and me having to make sense of all the noise just to do our jobs. Juggling multiple apps and windows — and the time it takes to refocus — can really take up your day.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Between work and personal life, the average adult spends nearly 11 hours looking at a screen per day. How does our increasing screen time affect our mental, physical, and emotional health?

We’re definitely more attached to screens than we ever have been before, and this is a major contributor to burnout. In fact, according to research from Future Forum, burnout is up 8% since May 2022, with women and younger people experiencing it more than other groups. The immense amount of time we spend on screens at work and in life is contributing to this feeling. By the end of a long day, when we’ve spent hours on Zoom, Slack or other platforms, it can be hard to disconnect from work, even when opportunities for connection are at our fingertips. This continual need to feel like we need to respond can impact our mental, physical and emotional health in profound ways.

Can you share your top five ways people can improve mental wellness and create a healthy relationship with technology?

I believe balance comes from our ability to use technology to make our lives easier, not more complex and noisy. In the workplace specifically, we have the opportunity to use technology to make our lives simpler, more pleasant and productive. For example, how can we turn slow, repetitive, manual processes into ones that save us time and reduce frustration? How can we minimize the context switching that takes away from our ability to focus and accomplish what needs to get done?

1. Create healthy habits for how you’ll engage from the time you wake until when you fall asleep: Set guardrails for when and how you engage with your various apps and tools in your work and personal life from the moment you wake up, like taking time to get a workout in, to when you go to sleep, like taking time to read or wind down from the busy day.
2. Automate routine and repetitive tasks at work: Automation eliminates the tedious context switching required to complete a single task — things like requesting PTO, setting up a meeting invite, or approving a request. In its place, your time is freed up for the more strategic, creative, and fulfilling work that’s unique to humans.
3. Adjust your notification settings: Apps and devices are constantly pushing information to us. Ensure you’re getting the important updates, when you need them, but hide those that will be distracting when you need to focus for a later time. I make sure to adjust my settings so that notifications allow me to stay focused yet informed.
4. Set boundaries for when and how you engage: When I’m taking time off work, I make sure to create an #out-of-office channel in Slack or set “out of office” messages and turn off my notifications so I’m not tempted to engage with work on my time off. The opposite is true when I need to get work done — I make sure to set physical boundaries, like putting my phone on a shelf across the room when I need to do deep work, and mental boundaries with other distractions that may pop up in my personal life, like browsing social media apps or watching the news.
5. Eliminate the need to multitask: At work, I set my ‘do not disturb’ status on Slack when I need to focus on deep work. This eliminates those noisy notifications that may pull my attention elsewhere. I’m lucky that I can keep my personal and professional devices separated, so I don’t even have notifications for work turned on for my personal devices. I leave my phone in my office or my bag for work. But it wasn’t always like that, and when that was the case, I made sure to set notifications in a way that didn’t tempt me to scroll through work-related items when I want to spend time with my family or friends.

Between social media distractions, messaging apps, and the fact that Americans receive 45.9 push notifications each day, Americans check their phones 80 times per day. How can people, especially younger generations, create a healthier relationship with social media?

My advice is to limit when — and for how long — we engage with the outside world through social media. It’s important that we don’t get sucked in to endlessly scrolling and miss opportunities to engage with others in real life. Whether that be limiting screen time or accessing apps during certain hours of the day, we should look for opportunities to put our screens down and make time for the things and people that matter most to us. I use my phone’s weekly reporting feature to make sure that I’m staying within the boundaries I’ve set for myself. I’ve found that works very well.

80% of smartphone users check their phones before they brush their teeth in the morning. What effect does starting the day this way have on people? Is there a better morning routine you suggest?

If we wake up and immediately check our phones for notifications, we’ll be dragged into an unending cycle of feeling like we need to be “on” and responsive to everything, constantly. I’ve been guilty of checking notifications and messages on my phone when I shouldn’t be, so I’ve had to learn to disengage from distractions when I need to be in the moment elsewhere. For some people, placing your phone away from your nightstand at night — or even in another room — can prevent us from having the feeling that we immediately need to be checking it when we wake up. It might also be helpful to set specific times in the morning, or even the evening, when devices are off limits, so you can focus on other activities of enjoyment. For me, I make sure to set my Slack status and mark my calendar in the mornings when I need to be away from my desk or phone and with my family. This lets people know when they can expect to connect with me and enables me to focus where I need to elsewhere.

Can you please give us your favorite life lesson quote?

“Everyone holds a piece of the truth, but no one holds it all.” To me, this is a reminder that in the same way people don’t know everything you’re going through, you don’t know everything about what they’re going through, either. It’s a reminder to approach with empathy and index on commonalities.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

Wow, that’s a big one. I think it would probably be something that tapped into the concept of the third place: somewhere that isn’t home or work but establishes a sense of well-being and connectedness. The third place is so key to our identity and sense of safety, and I think that sometimes it can be hard to prioritize it in our busy, busy lives.

What is the best way our readers can further follow your work online?

Folks can stay up to date on the latest with the Slack Community at: https://slackcommunity.com/

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.