How to Update Your Slack Status

The Basics: How to Update Your Status

On desktop: Click your profile picture in the top-right corner, select "Update your status," pick an emoji, write something short, and set an expiration time. Hit Save. Slack also offers quick suggested statuses — In a meeting, Out sick, Vacationing, Working remotely — if you want something instant.

On mobile: Tap your profile picture at the bottom of the screen, tap "Set a status," fill in the same fields, and tap Save.

To clear your status: On desktop, click your profile picture and hit the X next to your current status. On mobile, tap your status and select "Clear Status." If you set an expiration when you created it, Slack clears it automatically.

The One Step Most People Skip

Always set an expiration time. It's the most important part of the whole process, and the most commonly ignored.

A status without an expiration will eventually be wrong. You set "In a meeting" at 2pm, the meeting runs long, you jump into something else — and at 5pm your status still says you're in a meeting. Slack gives you quick options: 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, today, this week. Use them. It takes one extra second and saves a lot of confusion.

Why It Matters More for Managers

For individual contributors, a stale status is a minor inconvenience. For managers and team leads, it's a real communication gap.

Your team looks at your status to decide whether to interrupt you, whether something can wait, whether now is a good time for a quick question. If your status is consistently wrong or missing, people either stop trusting it altogether — or they ping you anyway, which defeats the purpose.

A well-maintained status is a small thing that builds a lot of ambient trust on a distributed team. People know what you're up to without having to ask.

The Obvious Problem: Nobody Remembers

The workflow breaks down in predictable ways. You block focus time on your calendar but don't update Slack. You get pulled into an unplanned call. You wrap up for the day and walk away. In each case, your status stays wrong or stays blank.

There's no perfect fix — it mostly comes down to habit. Setting expiration times helps. So does keeping your status options simple enough that updating takes two seconds rather than ten.

Building a Status Culture

Tools only go so far. Slack statuses work best on teams where people have agreed they matter — where keeping your status current is a shared norm, not something one person does and everyone else ignores.

If you're a team lead trying to build better async habits, modeling good status hygiene yourself is the easiest place to start. It's low effort, visible to everyone, and tends to be contagious.

And if you're managing a Slack workspace more broadly — monitoring activity, keeping channels clean, staying on top of what's happening across your team — that's what Chronicle for Slack is built for.