Even with threaded messages, my emoji-spreading habits aren’t gone. Many software orgs have adopted discussion and ticket systems that use markup and simple emoji, and I’ve learned very quickly to use them to my advantage.

I write about configuring servers to run software packages all day. And most of my team for the last four years have been remote and we do a lot of asynchronous communication in fits and spurts. And sometimes there are a lot of tricky little details involved in fixing the docs.

One of my Ukrainian colleagues started using colored text to indicate changes: green for gone, orange for add. It was such a great idea that I adapted it ight away. Then we got fancy and started using emoji and colored text blocks. Snowball a few years in and I’m juggling multiple brands across multiple projects, often with the same teams. So I swiped an idea from Madcap Flare — contextual tagging. One brand of changes is marked with little red boxes, one blue, one green … but I hope that they don’t add any more brands as I’m running low on colors. Bonus: it’s the same colors I use in Madcap Flare for conditional text, so it’s easier for other writers to get what changes go for what brands and where. Big help on a large conversion product where we pulled in 400 more articles and got ready to sync up another few hundred externally.

It’s more than boxes when I’ve got the tools handy: I also use Jira’s status tags extensively. Those and other indicators help us all track and show what’s what when we are speed-reviewing content for multiple brands in quick order.

Use what you’ve got, you never know what you’ll pull together.