Slack’s new ‘Catch Up’ feature knows you’re overwhelmed and overworked

Slack knows you’ve got a lot going on at work. There are just so many channels, messages, and threads. A new feature is aimed at making things easier to navigate.

The Verge reported Slack is set to add a feature called “Catch Up” that’ll let you swipe through channels and DMs, either marking it as read or leaving it unread. Catch Up is reportedly slated to drop only for the mobile app and is aimed at helping workers parse through the massive amounts of messages at any given time on Slack.

Slack envisions Catch Up as a tool to help people start or resume their workday. The company noticed that folks often use the mobile app as more of a prep station for the real work.

“Before they get to their desk in the morning, or when they’re away from their desk, or maybe at lunch — a 30-second session, super fast, just trying to catch up,” Akshay Bakshi, a product management director at Slack, told The Verge. “Then the stuff they want to get back to at their desktop, they leave it for later.”

Slack has been playing around with changes lately, including a complete redesign of the app that wasn’t particularly well received. It has, of course, added some AI functionality like every other company on planet Earth.

But hopefully, Catch Up will prove useful for folks. Oftentimes it feels like all the Slack channels and messages distract from real work instead of helping you get it done. Maybe this new feature can be a fix.