You open your laptop on your first morning back. The coffee is still too hot to drink. And there it is: 437 new messages.

Every channel is bold. Three people have sent you DMs. Somebody shipped something, somebody moved a date, and somewhere in there is a question that has been waiting for you since Tuesday.

Most of us handle this in one of two ways. Either we start at the top and read every message, which takes the whole morning. Or we hit “mark all as read” and hope nothing important was in there.

There’s a better way, and it takes about half an hour. Here it is, plus a few things your team can do so the next person who takes a week off comes back to less.

Why reading every message doesn’t work

Team chat is written for the moment, not for the person reading it a week later. A few things make reading it in order slow:

Long conversations end in short answers. A thread that ran to forty messages on Wednesday often ended in one decision. Reading all forty to find it is the slow way round.
Problems solve themselves without you. The bug someone flagged on Tuesday was fixed on Wednesday. Read in order and you’ll spend ten minutes worrying about something that’s already gone.
The order is wrong. Chat shows you messages by time. Coming back, you need them by importance: what needs you, what changed, and then everything else.

Why “mark all as read” feels so scary

Because it’s usually fine, and you can’t know when it isn’t without looking. That’s the whole problem. The answer isn’t to read everything or nothing. It’s to read in the right order, and stop once you have what you need.

A 30-minute routine for catching up on team chat

This works in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Drum or anything else with channels and DMs. The times are a rough guide for a week away.

1. Start with what’s addressed to you (5 minutes)

Mentions and DMs first. These are the messages where someone needed you, not just the team. Most chat apps have a view for this: Activity in Slack and Teams, the mention badges in Drum’s sidebar. You don’t have to solve everything now. “Back today, I’ll look at this before lunch” is a perfectly good answer.

2. Check the threads you were part of (5 minutes)

Conversations you started or replied to before you left are the most likely to have carried on with an open question for you. Look for anything that ends with your name or a question mark.

3. Read the channels where decisions get made (10 minutes)

Every team has one or two channels where things actually get decided: a project channel, #general, the weekly planning thread. Skim them for three things: decisions, dates and owners. Pinned messages are your friend here.

On a product or engineering team, the shortcut is the release notes and the incident channel. What shipped, what broke and what got fixed tells you more in five minutes than a week of reading #frontend from the top.

4. Skim the rest, then let it go (5 minutes)

Everything else gets a quick look: scan the channel names, open anything that looks surprising, then mark it as read. Without the guilt. If it mattered, it’s already turned up in steps 1 to 3, or someone will bring it up again.

5. Ask one person (5 minutes)

“What’s the one thing I should know?” Your teammates were there. They know which of the 437 messages actually mattered. A two-minute chat often beats an hour of scrolling, and it’s a nice way to say hello again.

Make the next return easier before you leave

The best time to make catching up easy is the day before your holiday, not the morning after.

Post a handover message in your team channel. There’s a template below.
Set a status with your return date, so people know not to wait on you.
Mute chat on your phone too, not just your laptop. A week off is a week off.

And a couple of habits for the whole team, which help everyone, not just people on holiday:

End long threads with the decision. One message, starting with “Decision:”, saying what was decided and by whom. “Decision: launch moves to the 21st.” Then pin it.
Welcome people back with a short “while you were away” note. Three bullet points take the team five minutes to write and save the person returning an hour.

Where AI summaries help, and where they don’t

This is the part that has got a lot easier recently. Asking an assistant “what did I miss?” gets you a first draft of your catch-up in seconds, and for a week of messages that’s a real time saver.

Treat it like a summary from a colleague: great for getting your bearings, not something to act on blindly. Before you act on a decision or a date, check the original message. Summaries are good at the gist and can miss the nuance, like the “unless” at the end of a sentence.

In Drum, that colleague is Ringo, the AI teammate who lives in your channels. Mention @Ringo and ask what you missed, and he answers right there in the channel, so the summary sits next to the messages it came from. He runs on Mistral in the EU, so your team’s conversations don’t leave Europe to be summarised.

A handover template you can copy

Paste this into your team channel before you leave and fill in the brackets:

Off from [date] to [date], back on [day].
While I’m away:
Releases: [name] owns [the next release]
Reviews: [name] can review my open PRs
Anything urgent: [name], or call me on [number] if it truly can’t wait
Still open: [link to thread], [link to thread]
I won’t be reading chat. If it can wait, it’ll wait, and I’ll catch up when I’m back.

The last line is the important one. It gives everyone permission to not loop you in, and it gives you permission to actually switch off.

FAQ

Is it OK to mark all messages as read after a vacation?
Yes, once you’ve checked your mentions, your DMs, the threads you were part of and the one or two channels where decisions get made. Anything important will almost always have reached you through one of those. The rest is context, not a to-do list.

How long should it take to catch up after a week off?
Our rule of thumb is about 30 minutes for the chat part. If it’s taking much longer, you’re probably reading things in order instead of by importance, or your team is making decisions in places that are hard to find.

What’s the fastest way to catch up on Slack or Teams after time off?
Start with the Activity view (your mentions and replies), then your threads, then your most important channels. Skim the rest and mark it as read. If your workspace has an AI assistant, ask it for a summary of the channels that matter, then check any decision against the original message.

Should I reply to old messages from while I was away?
Only if they’re still open. A quick “Just back, do you still need this?” is better than a long answer to a question that was settled three days ago.

Welcome back. The coffee should be drinkable by now.

Back from vacation? How to catch up on team chat without reading every message