Tip: Being more productive in Discord
00:00:00.000 | Hi, this is Jeremy Howard from Answer.ai with a quick explanation of how to become more
00:00:07.700 | productive in Discord.
00:00:10.760 | I kind of live my life in Discord nowadays.
00:00:13.520 | It's one of the most productive chat applications I've worked in over the last 30-plus years.
00:00:21.840 | Probably the best I've ever used was like 35 years ago, a usernet client called RN,
00:00:26.560 | but Discord maybe is my second most productive.
00:00:31.400 | I have a lot of servers in Discord, as you can see, because kind of most AI happens in
00:00:37.680 | Discord nowadays.
00:00:41.580 | So how do I manage this efficiently?
00:00:45.800 | It's basically all about keyboard shortcuts.
00:00:47.600 | What I want to do each day is read the channels that I actually care about and ensure that
00:00:52.640 | if somebody needs my attention that they get it.
00:00:56.560 | To read the channels that I care about, I can see on my screen that the ones marked
00:01:01.720 | with little blobs here are the ones that have unread messages.
00:01:05.600 | I don't want to miss any messages from the channels I care about, so I'm going to read
00:01:09.560 | all of them.
00:01:10.560 | So to make sure I just read all of them, I start at the very top and I hit Option + Shift
00:01:15.040 | + Down, or I guess on a Windows it would be Alt + Shift + Down, and it takes me directly,
00:01:20.880 | as you can see, to my next unread.
00:01:23.280 | Read that, Alt + Shift + Down or Option + Shift + Down, next unread, Option + Shift + Down,
00:01:29.240 | next unread, and I'll just keep doing this.
00:01:33.560 | And you'll see it even jumps into threads as well, so it's showing these unread stuff
00:01:38.320 | inside threads.
00:01:39.320 | So I really make sure that I don't miss anything.
00:01:42.200 | Now I'm at the end of this channel.
00:01:45.920 | Actually one thing, server, one thing I will mention is it's really important then to make
00:01:49.800 | sure that you don't see unread stuff in things you don't care about.
00:01:54.940 | So here's an example of something I don't care about, bot messages.
00:01:58.240 | So I've already gone in here and said Mute Channel.
00:02:01.240 | To make sure I don't even see it, actually, I will go ahead and say Hide Muted Channels.
00:02:06.400 | So now I don't even see it at all.
00:02:09.800 | The other thing is that some servers have administrators who use @Everyone or @Here
00:02:14.760 | too often.
00:02:15.760 | So if that's the case, you can always just say Notification Settings, sorry, I go Notification
00:02:25.400 | Settings, I'm sorry, for the server, and you can say Suppress @Everyone and @Here, and
00:02:30.720 | also make sure it's set to only @Mentions.
00:02:33.000 | That way you'll only get notified of stuff which is specifically sent to you.
00:02:37.640 | OK, so we've finished this server's channel, so if I press Option + Shift + Down again,
00:02:43.840 | it's now gone to the next server, which in this case is the HTMX server.
00:02:48.300 | And so I continue on, reading all of these, and you can see as I do each one, it gets
00:02:53.320 | marked as red.
00:02:54.320 | OK, and I've finished that server, one more, and we're on to the next one.
00:03:02.360 | OK, so that's the key thing to know, is make sure that you mute any servers that you don't
00:03:08.880 | really need to know about.
00:03:09.880 | Also, you can mute categories and channels, so in fact, for example, I'm not in any study
00:03:15.240 | groups for Fast.ai, so I just went ahead and muted the whole category.
00:03:21.400 | And then when you create messages, it's important to know that if you hit Shift + Enter, it
00:03:28.960 | doesn't send it, and that's the key thing to adding stuff like Python code.
00:03:33.980 | So just put back triple backticks, Python, triple backticks, and hit Shift + Enter after
00:03:38.960 | each line, and then when you're done, hit Enter.
00:03:42.920 | And then the other thing that's useful to know about is that you can then hit this little
00:03:48.720 | button up here to create a thread and give it a message.
00:03:57.800 | And now we've got a thread going, that's a really good way to make sure that you can
00:04:05.200 | have a long conversation without getting confused.
00:04:07.600 | Oh, and if you're worried why this is Jeremy with a U, this is actually a channel I share
00:04:12.800 | with my daughter, who told me that on Discord, when talking to her, it's necessary to always
00:04:17.360 | not have any Es in my name or messages.
00:04:20.800 | So everything has to be U.
00:04:21.800 | Oh, I should have changed this to message U. Oh well, sorry Claire.
00:04:25.720 | So, other than that problem with too many Es, that's my quick introduction to being
00:04:30.800 | more productive with Discord.
00:04:33.220 | And this is my first little experiment of doing fast, short little videos about small
00:04:38.720 | things, so let me know if you find this helpful.