One of the golden rules that I follow while communicating with someone in Slack (or any chat for that matter) is to ask only one question and wait for an answer. Only after I get the answer to first question, I ask the next question. When I ask two or more questions continuously, people tend to answer questions out of order or tend to miss answering some of them. I firmly believe that this hygiene is critical to maintain a sane conversation.

Problem

Most of the time when I am asking a question, I have a few more questions that I need to ask as follow ups. Due to the golden rule I mentioned above, I ask only one question and note down other questions in a scratchpad (in a text file or on a paper). After the first question is answered, I go to the scratchpad to look up my next question. This forces me to switch context between Slack and other app.

Solution

What if Slack provides a feature to store a set of draft messages on a per Slack channel basis? I.e. I type a message and press Alt+Enter and the message is stored as a Draft message. All draft messages are shown as a list above the user input area. When I got the answer to my first question, I pick my next question from the list of draft messages just by clicking on it. I think this will be immensely useful as this will help to stay within Slack without switching context.

I guess there are many people who will find this to be useful.