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How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy
- CiPHPerCoder 8y agoThe most useful thing about Slack is you can press Shift+ESC (sometimes you have to press it twice) to mark all conversations as read. Inbox zero with two keystrokes. Whoever implemented that, I'd like to buy a coffee someday. (Also, I discovered this because I use Ctrl+Shift+ESC instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Windows Task Manager immediately without going through the intermediary screen that pops up, and one day, I missed Ctrl.)
- stanlarroque 8y agoAnd I'd like to buy you a coffee someday for teaching me about the Ctrl+Shift+ESC shortcut.
- drather19 8y agoMake that two coffees!
- nkantar 8y agoAt least three. Or other beverages, really!
- CiPHPerCoder 8y agoHappy to help. If anyone's going to DEFCON this year, I'll be hanging around the Crypto & Privacy Village a lot, so feel free to say hi.
- SaltyBackendGuy 8y agoThis, seriously, just changed my life.
- dvlsg 8y agoI remember running into a few viruses floating around that (among other wonderful behaviors) disabled the ctrl+alt+del shortcut to try to prevent you from getting to the task manager. Often ctrl+shift+esc still worked, though.
- dewiz 8y agoWasn’t the Windows Start menu shortcut Ctrl+ESC?
- giancarlostoro 8y agoHad no idea there was another shortcut other than the Windows key, confirmed it works on Windows 10.
- dewiz 8y agoYes, ctrl-esc was the original shortcut since 3.x, and when there was no Win key yet
- nunez 8y agoHoly shit; I did not know that. Thank you!
- consumethreads 8y agodont use it ... if a production is actually not making your life better why tie yourself down to it. just use what works, force slack to innovate
- s3r3nity 8y agoNot sure why you're getting downvotes - it's a reasonable question to ask: "why use something that makes you crazy / stressed out? Not to set up a straw-man, but I'd imagine a similar reaction if someone wrote a post titled "How to use Facebook and not get depressed," the gut-reaction is "why use it if it's making you feel bad?"
- ben_w 8y agoA good question. The most powerful answer (for both examples) is because other-people-using-it makes its use by you necessary to get things done.
- consumethreads 8y agoand thats where my quesiton is not for the employees but for the employers. Why are you choosing to use a product in your company that has no use. If it had use then it wouldnt make people "crazy". It would make them happy. This inherently leads me to believe it has no use. Personal experience, there is no golden rule to these things. Email , slack , google calendar. You eventually need to build your own relationship with these things and be adult enough to maintain that relationship (inbox at 0), seperate it from your emotions and be prepared to toss it to the side for in person conversation. Its not slack that is making people crazy its the policies of using it at the company (or usually the lack there of) that make its benefit inconsistent. But it seems slack has not improved the situation but only exacerbated it.
- ben_w 8y agoAh, I see. I agree with you in that case, but in my experience the true-but-rubbish answer is generally that the decision makers had need to use a tool and “common sense” made them force it on everyone else without any consideration (a common problem whenever the justification is “common sense”).
- s3r3nity 8y agoIn two companies where we had piloted Slack, I led successful campaigns to transition away from it. Combining your choice of Email / IM client (Gmail / Hangouts or Outlook / Skype) satisfies 99% of use cases for Slack. Overall we were less stressed and didn't miss a beat. I'm sure there are industries / companies working in areas that it makes sense - but I don't think it just works for everyone by default in the same way that IM and Email do.
- kerbalspacepro 8y agoSkype is bad though? Like, I want a near-real time asynchronous messaging system that has all the features a messaging system should have... and you can't get that with Skype/Outlook. The two alone are a pain to use.
- lolsal 8y agoSincere question: How is Skype not a near-real time async messaging system? What features is it missing that 'a messaging system should have'?
- Kliment 8y agoReliable message delivery, reliable history and history search.
- charlietango92 8y agocan't you history search through outlook under the 'conversation history' folder? (or click the 'see more in outlook' hyperlink on skype.) Although yes, it's not built in to the skype app UI itself. And that would be nice.
- lostmsu 8y agoThat renaming Lync -> Skype is still very confusing.
- 8y ago
- minor3rd 8y agoI literally mute every channel except my direct team's channel. If you need me, @ me baby.
- jrootabega 8y agoNot really sufficient, unfortunately. People will always abuse this and mention you whenever they feel like it, without thinking if it really needs immediate attention. The only solution is disabling notifications entirely.
- ravenstine 8y agoIf it were email, those same people would abuse email. I don't think what you're saying is really a problem with Slack. Those people you're referring to are disrespectful morons.
- saltcured 8y agoI think the issue is that people already learned how to avoid going crazy with email. A large part of that is reading it in batches and not getting any notification when messages arrive. Some other people are bothered by this and seem to forever seek a way to worm their way back into your foreground attention. Slack conflates mentioning someone with notifying someone. Some of my coworkers use mentions like metadata. They think they are creating a better informatics resource by mentioning people by their Slack id instead of their name. They had no intention of it actually sending an immediate notification to interrupt anybody. They see Slack more like some kind of wiki and not like a chat system. I see Slack as a chat system and an even more worthless wiki than all the other wikis everyone creates and then abandons due to editorial debt. Unfortunately, we don't get to join different Slack systems with entrance exams to filter out the wrong sort of user...
- robotkdick 8y ago+1 I find this to be the best way to use Slack, as a more connected, more functional SMS. The problem is not so much Slack as the default settings for Slack. Used in the right way, it's a powerful tool
- e40 8y agoAnd yet there are many of us that use Slack in a way that is not intrusive, doesn't stress us out and adds incredible value. (I am unaffiliated with Slack, the company.) I recently started paying for it, after having used it free at my company for several years. We wanted full comment history. I will say, the bonus of video calls doesn't work at all, and I still pay zoom.us for that. (Yes, did a customer support interaction, told them my problems, they thanked me. They have a lot of work to do. Or, they should just purchase or merge with zoom.us.)
- bachmeier 8y agoIt seems every "how to do Slack right" post emphasizes that you shouldn't use Slack as a chat service. Well that's what it is. Why not use email for the beefier conversations that don't need to take place right away, and use chat for what it was intended? Chat is great for the occasional situation where you want to have a conversation about something, you'll have a bunch of short messages back and forth, and you want to keep a record of the conversation. Putting other stuff in there just clutters things up. Slack is a great replacement for Reply All with 20 email addresses. It's not so good as a replacement for other things.
- jasode 8y ago>It seems every "how to do Slack right" post emphasizes that you shouldn't use Slack as a chat service. Maybe other posts devolve to that but this post is different. The common repeating pattern he's pointing out is others misusing it for low-quality communication and suggesting some settings to get some sanity back. It's similar to previous advice about old technologies that others misuse where you had to counteract it with tactics to gain productivty. E.g. Phones - turn off ringer and manage voice mail. Email - set automatic category/priority/junk filters.
- bachmeier 8y agoThe author says: "It’s very easy to overuse DMs and see Slack as a real-time chat." "We encourage people to be mindful about notifications. No DM is so important that it can’t wait half an hour. In fact, I see this still underused. Slack has a Do Not Disturb feature and Atlassian’s HipChat successor, Stride, made this one of its cornerstones, which they refer to a “Focus Mode.” If something is really urgent, people will call you on your phone. Everything else can wait a bit. Uninterrupted time is important — don’t let Slack take that away from you because someone is bored and asks you how your day is." To be clear, the author does say that you should sometimes consider sending an email. My point is that the emphasis is on using Slack as something other than chat, but that's really its main use case.
- jasode 8y ago
- nrjames 8y agoI'm reminded of this Agile Bits blog post about "curing" themselves of Slack. https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-addiction/ https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-addic...
- ojuara 8y agoBookmarked to read later! Thanks
- dalbasal 8y agoIf I could just find a way of curing teams from agile...
- steipete 8y agoThanks for the link - it's linked in the post as well, certainly interesting to know. We also have someone working at our company who previously worked at 1Password and is really happy that he can use Slack again.
- nrjames 8y agoSlack is the epicenter of all manner of communication problems where I work, and sadly, we have not yet figured out how to solve the problems. We have no remote employees, yet the 30 of us, who all sit right near each other, spend all day Slacking. I believe about 85% of messages are Direct Messages. It's extremely frustrating.
- dberg 8y agoThis x 1000. I constantly remind my team to favor face to face communication where possible. We have peopl hipchat each other sometimes literally sitting across the desk from each other. It creates such a frustrating "i spend half my day in chat" culture i just cant imagine the productivity drain.
- jasode 8y ago>to favor face to face communication where possible. We have peopl hipchat each other sometimes literally sitting across the desk from each other I understand your preference for face-to-face but one reason some prefer text chat is to minimize the ambient noise level in the office so as to not disturb others. For me, one problem with face-to-face (and voice calls) is I often end up having to take notes and transcribe what the person is saying to me. Instead, if you just send me a text chat or email, it saves me the step of being your secretary to type in what you just told me.
- djhworld 8y agoAt work we have an enterprise contract with Slack, but the implementation is really strange. Before the contract, there were a lot of teams/departments using Slack, so naturally an assortment of team workspaces started to accrue. Once the enterprise contract came into place, those workspaces were integrated under one company banner so you can sign up with one login and join any company 'workspace'. This means that if you need to talk to a team in a different workspace, you have to open a new tab in your browser and then join that. This is annoying, and is even worse when 'global' channels were introduced, because ANY notification gets broadcast across all the workspaces you have open. Even DMs, if someone DMs me my Firefox tab bar lights up red across 5 different tabs. This is partly an organisational problem in the company, but I think Slack should take some of the blame too to reduce these niggles
- matchbok 8y agoIt amazes me how popular Slack is. Terrible performance, constant interruptions, horrible threads. Here's an exercise. You and your coworker discussed plans for a project in a large channel 3 weeks ago. You need to get all that information and give it to someone else. How do you do it? You can't. It will be interspersed with a bunch of other nonsense from other people and isn't grouped or organized in any sane manner. This whole "chat" in workplace thing does nothing to actually get work done.
- stephengillie 8y agoIt got so bad at my last job that we mandated a new channel for any discussion longer than 3 lines, between any 2 SMEs, on any topic. They still use an application's worth of Powershell scripts to create and archive dozens of channels per day, and automatically update the associated Zendesk ticket.
- dewey 8y agoWhat's the alternative though? I really don't like Slack but I don't see another great way of doing it. - Face to Face: No record, even harder to give to someone - Wiki: Goes stale pretty quickly - E-Mail: Same problem, slower, as distracting as Slack
- gsich 8y agoIRC gateway from Slack. But they closed it down because <insert random bullshit PR message here>.
- lghh 8y agoHow does that solve the problem the poster is describing? IRC still has that issue.
- dewey 8y agoI also prefer IRC but in this case it doesn't really improve anything. The opposite really, no build-in search, no easy onboarding, no central logs,... (Yes, I know I can build all this with ZNC, ELK or by using IRC cloud but that doesn't solve the issue about chat vs. some other system)
- gnu8 8y agoNo one should be using slack at all. I understand that it fills use cases that email and irc don’t, but that is no excuse for letting all of your communications be owned by some other company. What if slack accidentally or deliberately denies access to your data? What if they choose to use it for their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? What if they get hacked by Russia?
- Shank 8y ago> What if they choose to use it for their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? I appreciate the sentiment, but Slack has a privacy policy and a known system for how they make money (they charge customers). Companies don’t just, on a whim, decide to start giving away data, especially when they know that it’s valuable and they have a business model of trust. Slack has this. So does basically every other corporate geared SaaS. Being worried about data security is a real problem. That’s understandable. But companies don’t just “decide” how to use data on a whim — it’s a business after all. When you pay for a product, that direct monetary exchange is the one that firmly identifies who the product is — and it’s not you.
- mmt 8y ago> But companies don’t just “decide” how to use data on a whim Their acquirers do, however.
- adrianmonk 8y agoThe risk you're talking about definitely exists. It's interesting how people treat that risk, though. You could make a similar argument to say you should never rent office space. Your stuff is stored in a building you don't own, and the landlord could deny you access either accidentally or deliberately. (This actually does happen sometimes with incompetence or landlord/tenant disputes.) But few people really feel like it's a big issue. In practice, most companies will rent office space without batting an eye. I suppose one difference is there are some explicit tenant protection laws, but it still feels like a similar calculated risk thing. You outsource because the risks are low enough, trust is high enough, and the alternative of doing it yourself takes away too much from focusing on your business.
- inertiatic 8y agoMy team recently started using slack again and I'm finding it extremely lacking. Whoever made the decision to use it cheaped out and didn't pay for it, so our history on channels is just getting lost, while I can still search for useful info or tips from 2 years ago on Gchat. You can argue that this is the business model, but that is a shitty business model then. Sell features that further empower a team, don't intentionally remove one of the largest benefits of communicating in writing. But what really pissed me for the past few months is the fact that you are unable to mute specific people. I recently had to coach a junior person, who despite being bright, fun etc. just failed to take to heart that they shouldn't interrupt someone to ask for something they could figure out themselves by looking around some, or that smiling emojis a minute after they got their answer was an additional interruption. This lack of a basic feature caused me weeks if not months of agony, making me more angry than I should be towards a person that didn't really deserve it, making me worried about my performance etc.
- whorleater 8y ago>our history on channels is just getting lost my company actually pays for slack but had to enable limited history, since developers kept on writing stuff that should be in wiki's or documentation in slack and relying on the search.
- yoz-y 8y agoThis kind of shows that people just want to write stuff and search for it later, rather than spend time organizing it. Gmail and Google Drive encourage this behavior too. Of course for somebody who just comes in, this is pretty suboptimal.
- mrpoptart 8y agoBetter workflow: Star every individual you talk to Star channels you talk to often Mute channels you only read occasionally Occasionally close messages to people to clear the list. Important things stay on the top, everything else moves to the bottom.
- MisterTea 8y agoI've used slack. Worked at a small web shop of 10 people (one remote) which used slack. Wanna know what it was used for, and still to this day? Posting memes, cat and cute animal pictures, political news articles, funny articles, food related stuff, youtube, gifs, ad nauseum. The project dev channels were all dead as the shop was small enough where people didn't need a bloated chat app for the few projects they managed. The one remote worker was paired with a local dev and they did all their communication via direct chat. Plus they still left access to the main random channel to ex employees so everyone could keep in touch. So there was an additional dozen people posting crap all day. Slack was used for entertainment and distraction. I think the "modern" web chat idea is more of a distraction than help. IRC might be primitive but it does what it was made for without the distraction of gifs, memes, videos and other nonsense.
- imglorp 8y agoLarge shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all in the same office. One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs. There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many requiring expert scripting to accomplish.
- yoz-y 8y agoWe have used Slack and now switched to Google Chat. I think your problems stem from the fact that using slack for off-topic discussion was allowed in the first place. Could it be that the bosses were not present?
- getrendevu 8y agoThe author addresses how to reduce the amount of notification spam in slack, but doesn't really get to the root of why there are so many notifications in the first place. At Rendevu (https://rendevu.co https://rendevu.co), we think that's because people are attempting to use slack for more than it is -- mainly, using it to broadcast team information (documents / decisions / faqs), that then get pushed above the fold in channels by memes / gifs / other chatter, and then have to be reposted again and again. We're building an intelligent feed that aggregates information from the tools you already use (Gsuite / Trello / Slack), and gives your team one place to stay on top of things. It's in alpha right now, but feel free to sign in and try it at https://rendevu.co https://rendevu.co. Any feedback is much appreciated :)
- newnewpdro 8y agoSlack eliminating the irc gateway has made it completely useless via low bandwidth internet connections. It's awful, and seriously alienating when I'm off grid for extended periods with a weak cell signal capable of ~14KiB/s. I hate that nearly everyone has adopted this proprietary hosted garbage that gives zero fucks for users outside the meat of their target market.
- curry_maker 8y agoUse glip.com. Is slack on steroids.
- ironjunkie 8y agoI cannot wait for the day where slack will just die. Or better, the day where people realize that Slack-style communication is most of the time completely useless and actually hurst productivity. I now see that people start to realize this more and more. Slack was so much hyped a couple years ago that everyone had to use it to be cool. Now, people reflect on it and they realize that it mainly brings constant buzz and unneeded notifications. There is a use case for it, but for 99% of any serious discussion, email is usually way better.
- tlynchpin 8y agoThere's no mention in TFA or here about Compact mode. Get into Preferences, in "Messages & Media", in section "Theme" switch to "Compact". Now your slack is more Lego and less Duplo.
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