Slack lets you focus on conversations by team, project, or subject using channels—you join only those channels relevant to you. But join too many channels and your Slack sidebar gets crowded, making it tough to monitor the most important discussions.

The solution is sections, which let you group related channels in the sidebar. For example, you might have a section of channels for each work project, another for administrative channels, and one for personal stuff. (You create sections on Mac, but those sections sync across Slack on iPhone and iPad.)

Here are five ways to use this essential feature:

Create a new section: Control-click anywhere in the sidebar’s channel list, choose “Create new section,” and give the section a name—plus a custom emoji to make your sidebar easier to browse and a little more fun.

Move a channel into a section: Drag a channel onto the desired section name, or Control-click the channel name and choose “Move channel” > channel name.

Move multiple channels into a section: Control-click anywhere in the sidebar’s channel list and choose “Edit sidebar.” Select the desired channels and click “Move to...” to choose a section.

Create a section for DMs: Direct and group messages eventually disappear from the “Direct messages” section of the sidebar, but you can use sections to keep ongoing conversations handy: Bring up the “All direct messages” list by pressing Shift-Command-K, click a conversation to make it temporarily appear in your list of DMs in the sidebar, then drag that conversation into a section—it will stay there until you manually remove it!

Organize your sections: Rearrange the sections themselves to put the most important ones at the top of the sidebar—simply drag a section name up or down the list. (The order of sections in the sidebar also controls the order in which channels appear in “All unreads.”)

Within each section, you can also control the order in which channels are displayed: Control-click a section name, then choose a sorting method: alphabetically, recent activity (channels with the most recent messages at the top), or priority (channels you use most often at the top). In this same menu, choose “Unreads only” to further focus your sidebar by hiding channels with no unread messages.