Scheduled Slack presence for remote work
Keep Slack Active During Your Working Hours
NotAway keeps your Slack presence active and green during the schedule you choose, across multiple Slack workspaces.
Keep My Slack ActiveWhy Slack marks you away
Slack presence depends on activity signals from the desktop app, browser, and mobile app. If those signals pause while you are in a meeting, reading a document, or focused in another tool, Slack can show you as away even though you are still available.
How NotAway keeps Slack active on schedule
Set the days, hours, and timezone when you want accurate availability. During that window, NotAway keeps your Slack presence active. Outside the schedule, it stays quiet so your status does not imply after-hours availability.
Multiple Slack workspaces
Freelancers and contractors often work in several Slack workspaces. NotAway lets you manage those connections in one dashboard instead of switching between client teams to keep each workspace online.
No mouse jiggler, no browser tab
NotAway runs as a web service. There is no device to carry, no local app to keep awake, and no Slack browser tab that must stay open. Your scheduled Slack presence is managed in the background.
The ten-minute rule
Slack normally moves you to away after 10 minutes without desktop activity. What counts as activity is narrower than most people expect: it responds to keyboard and mouse input, not to whether you are sitting there. Reading a long document, watching a screen share, sketching on paper, or thinking all register as nothing at all.
Mobile behaves differently again — the app generally treats you as active while it is open in the foreground, and drops you when it is closed or backgrounded. That is why your dot can disagree with itself across devices. Our guide to Slack online status goes through the mechanics in detail.
What people try first, and where each one stops
| Approach | How it works | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Nudging the mouse | Real input, manually | Requires you to remember, every ten minutes |
| Phone left open | Mobile app in foreground | Drains the battery; stops when the screen locks |
| Mouse jiggler | Simulated cursor movement | Needs the computer on and unlocked |
| Caffeine-style apps | Prevents the machine idling | Sleep prevention is not input — often no effect on Slack |
| Scheduled presence | Maintains the Slack connection | Slack only; a paid service |
Every device-level option shares one ceiling: it inherits your computer's availability. Close the laptop and presence ends with it. We compare the local tools in detail in Caffeine vs mouse jiggler.
What setting it up involves
Create an account, connect a Slack workspace, and set the days and hours you want your availability to reflect. NotAway holds the connection during that window and stops outside it. There is no application to install and nothing to leave running on your machine.
If a workspace connection later needs its credentials refreshed, you get an email rather than discovering it from a colleague. That matters more than it sounds: a device-level tool has no concept of an individual workspace failing, so a broken connection stays silent.
When this is the wrong tool
If your computer is on and unlocked through the day anyway, and you only need Slack green while you work at that one machine, a free local utility will do the job and cost you nothing. NotAway earns its place when your machine is not reliably on, when you are holding several workspaces at once, or when you want presence bounded to actual working hours instead of running whenever the laptop happens to be awake. If you need Teams or Zoom held active too, a system-level tool covers more ground than a Slack-specific service does.
Pricing
Monthly
$3.99/month
- Multiple Slack workspaces
- Custom schedule and timezone
- Sync error email alerts
Annual
$29.99/year
- Multiple Slack workspaces
- Custom schedule and timezone
- Sync error email alerts