9 ms·

What happened when Buffer stopped using Slack on Fridays

108 points by prostoalex 8y ago

sidhanthp 8y ago
Honestly, I never viewed Slack as synchronous. I kept all notifications off, and checked it whenever I had a few minute break or wanted to catch up on our office's conversation. Slack allowed anyone to contact me by tagging me or @here, so it was obvious when someone wanted it to be synchronous (therefore breaking my communication), but the grand majority of communication was asynchronous unlike email - which does a poor job of differentiating between messages that should (and shouldn't) break attention.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  I work fully remote and that's what I think as well. It's a thing that let's you wait or respond immediately, up to you. That's the major selling point. Depends on company culture, of course. But my team is also distributed from -8 to + 10 UTC. So nobody is expecting someone who is asleep to write back to them. Another thing to note is the presence of other sources of communication, like GitLab issues. If you have those you don't always have to ping a live person in sync mode. Often you can just pick up an issue and do it with minimal input.
  - xte 8y ago
    Hem, plain classic emails offer the very same thing: it's up to you respond quickly or leave the message behind... IMAP IDLE is not exactly a new thing...
    - lordnacho 8y ago
      As does snail mail. But I think by now the benefits of a chatroom UX are clearly valued by a lot of people.
      - xte 8y ago
        Mh, perhaps lot of people who never tried good modern MUA like notmuch-emacs or mu4e or perhaps even mutt&forks of pine&forks... I still have to find a webui more effective than my notmuch-emacs UI (with, of course, notmuch underneath)...
- draw_down 8y ago
  At least for me, the whole problem with Slack is how many/how often I get @mentions or DMs, not the other stuff. Sure the other stuff is async, that’s not really the issue at least for me and lots of others
- mooreds 8y ago
  That is the first thing I do when I install a slack client at a new job. Turn off all the notifications. Then I check it when it makes sense for me. I give team members my phone number and say "text me if you need something ASAP". People don't do that unless it really is important, in my experience.
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  Same. I have Slack on my phone but I refuse to enable notifications. I open it when I choose to and respond when I can/if I need to.
- why_only_15 8y ago
  They mentioned this in the article - "Slack is capable of being both sync and async, though we’ve noticed that there does seem to be some social expectation of a quick response on Slack regardless of how explicitly we state otherwise."
- lxmorj 8y ago
  I really wish they had @ and @-whenever-you-get-to-it tags
ebzlo 8y ago
I think the distinction between async and sync messaging is really critical here and highlights a different form of communication that folks are incorrectly using Slack to solve. When I was at Facebook, this type of communication was extremely abundant and took place on Workplace. When you are pushed information, there is some expectation to respond (as highlighted by the author). However, Workplace's opt-in type of communication via feed didn't have this problem. And interestingly isn't really prevalent outside forums and groups (which I don't think are used commonly at companies). I think splitting out that kind of behavior was beneficial, it wasn't email (which is a push that people ignore), but rather a subscribe where there was no stigma to be late, and people could take their own time to catch up on posts.
- matchbok 8y ago
  Exactly. 99% of workplace coms don't need to be synchronous. Slack assumes that they do. Thus you get tons of noise and chatter and the feeling that you have to check it all the time. Hell, even the idea of a chat room isn't productive to getting "work" done at all IMO. If you aren't watching it every minute, you immediately lose all the context and knowledge. It's such a waste.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    But it means everybody has to keep one eye on Slack at all times, which translates into huge "engagement" numbers for Slack. So "synchronous everything" may be bad for you, but it's great for them!
  - sotojuan 8y ago
    Nah. Just turn off all notifications outside of mentions. If people want to reach you they can mention or message you. I do this and don’t check Slack for hours or even a whole day. Most problems people have with Slack are people problems.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      I'm not on Slack, we have Lync or whatever Microsoft calls it now at work. I have all notifications off, so I only notice new messages when I bring that window to the foreground.
ddtaylor 8y ago
A bit off-topic but the nagging and distracting on that website is insufferable. Firefox reader mode did a great job of cleaning it up and making it readable.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  I really wonder how a website can end up looking like this: https://i.imgur.com/GL2buwD.png https://i.imgur.com/GL2buwD.png
  - ddtaylor 8y ago
    Holy cow, I didn't even see a few of those probably because of blockers I have installed. That's even worse than what I was seeing.
  - pragmatick 8y ago
    Well, the top and bottom notifications are probably due to GDPR. But the one on the left is horrible, yes.
    - jakobegger 8y ago
      I'm not sure how being related to GDPR somehow makes them okay? It's still a crappy experience.
matchbok 8y ago
Productivity would go even higher if you stopped using for the other 4 days. Synchronous chatrooms have very little work value in my experience. You either miss out on a ton of information from all the people chatting or you have to watch it every minute for updates. Nonsense.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Agreed. Synchronous chat is good for small teams who are working on the same thing at the same time, and for banter during lunch break.
  - matchbok 8y ago
    Yeah. All jokes aside, Slack is really only good for slacking off.
- tootie 8y ago
  Then you haven't balanced the size of your rooms. Slack should be your first and primary communication channel and there's a load of good reasons. For one, you can never guarantee nor should you expect your team to be colocated. Even if you have one office, people should be free to work from home. Side chats get lost, people forget or don't hear. Slack is public and searchable. No mumbling and if you mistype, you can fix it. Plus you can add documents, links, images while you're talking. People say getting communication on their phones is like an anchor to their desk but I feel the exact opposite. It means I can leave my desk anytime I want and not be out of communication. If something critical needs my attention, I can answer while I'm home and not go back to work.
  - twbarber 8y ago
    > People say getting communication on their phones is like an anchor to their desk I’ve been struggling with this lately, to the point where I’ve experimented with going back to a dumb phone, and trying to use my smart phone without Slack. As a remote employee, I think having Slack on mobile has lead to a greater degree of freedom, as you mentioned, but I also wonder if the constant tether is leading me to burnout more quickly.
zwayhowder 8y ago
> 4. A CASUALTY: “CHECK OUT THIS ARTICLE I SAW” Wait what? If only there was some application out there that could queue up article sharing to an appropriate time.
- yaseer 8y ago
  This made me lol, but also reflect. I bet the people that championed this deep work experiment, ironically, do not like social media for its distracting effects. It's the main reason I stay off social media.
  - nerpderp83 8y ago
    You are on social media right now.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      Yes and no. HN is definitely social, but there are no friends, no feeds, and no notifications, so it's unlike social media as most people understand the term. If I skip HN for a day, there's a whole front page of articles that I'll probably never see, and never know that I missed.
    - vokep 8y ago
      Sorta...yes it is media as it is information transferred over a medium..but I think nerdponx is excluding this because its more 'social internet' than social media. With social media, you are like a company, with your brand, that you are trying to ensure looks good and shows good collaboration with other companies. With social internet, you are a human talking to other humans through technology.
- groundCode 8y ago
  Exactly what I thought when I read that. I wonder how much stopping slack meant they all just jumped on twitter
docker_up 8y ago
I think a no-Hacker-News or no-reddit day would be far more productive for me.
- ry_ry 8y ago
  I spend more time knowingly slacking off than I do reading slack. Then again I fully subscribe to the '4 hours of full productivity per day' theory.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    Is that a real theory? Seems to totally fit how I work!
- invalidOrTaken 8y ago
  We(as in HN) should have a no-HN day.
sokoloff 8y ago
Most used Slack channels at our company: #freefood<location>
ergothus 8y ago
I'm shocked at many of the responses here, when people will also complain about hostility towards remote workers. Slack is a vital part of my working, PARTICULARLY when one of the parties is remote. Sure, as this article is saying, having some space to not be interrupted is a good thing - but that's hardly the same as saying USUALLY having no synchronous option is good, much less EVER having a synchronous option. 1) Email was great...until too much crap showed up in email and people stopped reading it. Remove the synchronous option and you'll just have another form of email. The Mythical Man Month talks about communication overhead - 2) The vast bulk of my slack communication is quick questions/answers. Sure, an interruption is annoying, but usually well worth it if it unblocks someone. (and when that someone is me, I value it much more). The value here tends to vary in proportion to someone's quick response time. I have a few coworkers that wont' check Slack more than once or twice a day. I hate having to work with them on anything, and we tend to have more scheduled meetings that are far less efficient. Others can be counted on to respond within 10 mins, and usually within a min - working with them is a breeze. There is definitely a number of tricks to adopt and etiquette to follow...just like any form of communication. It can be used poorly and have more costs than benefits, or well and have the reverse. My tricks: * I replaced the default notification sound with something less jarring. Basically a gentle sound that clues me in to glance at the notification. If it's not something I need to respond to, I'm usually not pulled out of flow. This is a huge difference. * When that notification is still too much, and/or someone starts a detailed chat about something I don't care about, `/dnd 10min` tells slack to shut up for a bit, without me having to tinker with settings and worry about remembering to UN-tinker those settings. * If using a Pomodoro technique, add in a scan of Slack between sessions. That's fast enough that most people are happy and not blocked long, but doesn't break up your work efforts. This advice is only partially tested, as I'm still struggling to adopt a routine. * Many people will tell you to turn off notifications - I recommend AGAINST this unless you're using a technique like the last to make sure you don't miss things. Instead, make sure you're only in channels that are relevant to you - if you're getting pinged and aren't interested, the problem is not the tool. In particular, you want to manage the expectations about reaching you - if people think you aren't responding, they'll just get more annoying, not patient. I have coworkers that will often join into channels for related teams, get their answers, then leave...a process they repeat possibly multiple times that day, while I hang out in many, many channels. Both ways do the job well. * I gave a presentation where I worked on effective ways to communicate with text. One of the best is to not ask A or B questions - instead ask yes/no questions. Not: "Is the API key for foobar still in file.env? Or is it from the new service call?" (You will be told "Yes" or "no" and have no idea what the actual answer is) Instead: "The API key for foobar is still in file.env? And not yet from the new service call?" ("yes" or "no" will have a clear meaning) This technique alone has taken a big bite out of my frustrations in using slack (and any other communication) and reduced unnecessary traffic, though it takes some practice. I responded to Slack pings in the course of writing this :)
starshadowx2 8y ago
In my experience the use of a chatroom has been nothing but positive. We use Google Chat and it's largely where I do most of my work even. I'm able to talk to any person in the organization (which is very spread out physically) instantly. All of my coworkers share information and ask each other questions either directly or in our shared rooms and all of that can be easily searched and found by anyone else who needs it. Maybe it's just something Chat does better than Slack (no experience with it) but I can mute any person, room, or conversation in a room. Personally I don't use sound notifications so maybe that's more of a bother. Since Chat is just a tab I have open I can just look up and see the icon colour change when something new shows up (blue for new message, red for new direct message). All of this also really hinges on the type of work you do I guess as well.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  We use Google Chat and it's largely where I do most of my work even Most of us here have jobs where our actual work needs to be done outside of chat rooms.
  - starshadowx2 8y ago
    >All of this also really hinges on the type of work you do I guess as well.
dleslie 8y ago
BaseCamp + Slack has been a general win for us. We use BaseCamp for anything that should have any temporal meaning beyond the present, and Slack for water-cooler conversation, coordinating tests, coordinating releases, hot-topic issues, and similar. Basically, anything that is best served with a post-mortem or no record at all goes in Slack. Slack can be totally ignored and one can remain a positively contributing member of the team; but it exists because we're social mammals and we _don't have an office_. Slack _shouldn't_ be ignored because it is a place of coordination and rapid response, but it _can_ be if one wants to focus on a particular task. That said, Slack's VoIP for meetings sucks when you have more than a half-dozen people.
- rprime 8y ago
  I've been looking to ditch Slack in favor of Basecamp, isn't Campfire enough to replace Slack?
  - dleslie 8y ago
    We tried campfire and found that mapping chat to projects didn't make sense when what we really wanted was an office banter space. It was even harder to track meaningful conversations! Also, not enough fun integrations for our team. We have all sorts of custom bots, emoji, and such. ;)
- seppin 8y ago
  Slack + Trello for the money minded, works great.
weliketocode 8y ago
I'll take slack over email by a country mile. A lot (maybe even most or all) of the negativity around slack in this thread is from misuse. Slack is a tool. If it's becoming a distraction, change your approach.
- moorhosj 8y ago
  Email is also a tool that can be misused.
  - seattle_spring 8y ago
    So is a circular saw. But between the 3 options, one is a clear winner for the topic at hand.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Out of the incredible volume of emails I get, if it's important I'll either be watching for it. Or someone will instantly come over to my desk asking if I looked at it. this seems to be a trend at every company I've worked at dating back to 90s.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  >misuse You mean, using it how the designers expressly intend it to be used?
p1necone 8y ago
I don't get the slack hate. It's just a chatroom, if your team is using it in a way that impedes productivity that's on you. Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately every time there's new conversation happening.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  >Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately Ugh this is such a common strawman for why most people criticize Slack. I've never heard someone say "Slack has a weird magical power over me where I'm physically incapable of _not_ checking the notifications." What people are saying is that Slack _encourages_ synchronous communication through it's explicit design choices. Why do people want to use a tool where you have to exert conscious effort to deviate from the designer's intentions in order to get value from the product?
  - marktangotango 8y ago
    IMO it’s the fear of missing a direct message from my boss is why I feel the need to check every notification immediately. I don’t know that he expects instant responses from the team, but he hasn’t said otherwise, either. Ideally there’s a culture where high priority is @here and non urgent is email. I have not seen this in practice.
    - quickthrower2 8y ago
      I've been taken to task in the past by a boss who sits behind me because I ignored a chat message. So yeah that threat is real but maybe us pions are to blame and we need to "grow some" not put up with it and be prepared to instaquit if necessary. I get the feeling in most countries the demand for developers (etc...) is fierce.
      - fjsolwmv 8y ago
        More to the point, if your boss is an asshole they can be an asshole without slack/chat
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
paulie_a 8y ago
Slack is good for group messaging for a real time chat about an issue that will get resolved hopefully in the next few hours, coordinating lunch orders, posting random YouTube videos, news articles and memes. There are focused channels on dealing with specific projects that can be productive. But those are lesser utilized. The daily stand-up channel, only a couple people actually read them. For actual stand-ups, every one is checked out. Slack is nice for a few things because email is useless with thousands of emails that are irrelevant. On the plus side I'm glad I don't have a work voicemail anymore. At a previous company the owner would forward 30 minute recordings of a conversation, for 3 years I just deleted every voicemail. It actually never caused a problem. Every day I'd have 8-10 voicemails waiting, every day I just hit 7, 8-10 times. People over communicate but say nothing important and it just adds noise.
Benjammer 8y ago
"But you don't _have_ to do X" "But you _could_ use it like Y" Stop with this. Why are you trying to force the square peg into the round hole so hard? Why do people like the idea of using Slack against how it's designed? These arguments are so tiresome.
- RHSeeger 8y ago
  Can you explain why you think Slack is designed to be synchronous and have people constantly checking it? I don't feel like to pushes me in that direction at all.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    Because its design primarily pushes sync and while you can do async with it, many bosses treat is as an instant messenger.
stephengillie 8y ago
The worst part of a synchronous chatroom is repeatedly asking for something you need now - and getting drowned out by irrelevant conversations, other tech chats, and cat gifs. Because you need the PR to finish the ticket and go home. But 2 people who are done for the day are still discussing house siding with a remote dev.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  That's what separate channels are for.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    You're suggesting to start a new channel just for the PR?
    - learc83 8y ago
      I think they're suggesting seperate channels for the non work related stuff. Or just smaller channels in general.
      - stephengillie 8y ago
        And how do you expect to get the siding discussion into the other channel if you can't get their attention?
        learc83 8y ago
        It's not a one time deal. You have to set the expectation that some channels are for work only, some channels are for off-topic discussions. You might need someone with some authority to help with this. I take charge of managing some of the slack channels at my company, and we're able to keep the off-topic conversation mostly contained.
  - allannienhuis 8y ago
    Isn't that what direct messages are for?
keithnz 8y ago
Where I work Slack gets a little bit of use for some semi synchronous conversations. Not a lot. The rest of the time it's mostly a way to copy paste things to other people... links, code snippets, log files, screen shots
wpietri 8y ago
From what I've experienced, slack is to the virtual company what the open office plan is to physical offices. Cheap, easy, and in many ways pleasant, but having everyone present in the same space makes it very hard to focus. For centuries tech has been about making everything easier, faster, more connected. IMHO, next we have to thoughtfully and discerningly step back from that where it isn't helping. As an example, for the last 30 days I've stopped looking at news and Twitter before noon. They put me in a fast-paced, reactive, what's-next mindset. Leaving them until later means I'm more focused and less tense. I'm doing it for at least another 30 days.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  > makes it very hard to focus. Companies don't go out of business because employees are distracted by chat messages and noisy conversations, they go out of business because employees are working on the wrong thing. Slack still has a lot of work to do if they really want to succeed in their mission, but I also don't think it's entirely fair to judge them (excessively) negatively based on it being distracting because that's not the point.
  - mijamo 8y ago
    Thatvis a strawman. Open spaces don't make companies go bankrupt either. Yoi could also say Slack does not cause nuclear wars, which is also true but also not the point. Slack was supposed to be a progress compared to other communications channels, for instance mails, phone calls and previous IRC channels. My takeaway from Slack is that it is very nice for chatting casually and organizing lunches, but it does a poor job at improving professional communication. I sometimes feel its appeal is mostly gifs for fun and the ability for managers to ping people and expect immediate answers.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    > entirely fair to judge them (excessively) negatively This is tautological. Maybe try expressing this more usefully? > Companies don't go out of business because employees are distracted by chat messages and noisy conversations Why not? Unending distraction raises costs and encourages a focus on the urgent rather than the important. That will raise prices and lower the company's ability to do strategic rather than tactical work. That seems like a major risk to me. I agree that there are risks the other direction as well. A company can become too insular or too scattered. But that doesn't mean that one can ignore the opposite risks. > being distracting because that's not the point I agree that's not the point for them. But as a user, it's definitely a point for me. And if you're looking for ways that companies go out of business, doing what they want rather than what the user needs is a common one.
kapauldo 8y ago
It's not obvious to me why anyone uses slack
throwaway-18 8y ago
I'm inbox zero type of personality and my workplace is incredibly email heavy. Reply-All with far more people than need be present is commonplace and it almost feels taboo to remove someone. What you end up with in a situation like that is inbox overload, synchronous conversations in email and lots of anxiety because now I have 2,000 emails in my "inbox" and just the thought of categorizing them now exhausts me. For that type of culture, I much prefer slack. The synchronous conversation can happen, you can choose to pay attention or not and, generally, someone will @ you if they really need your input. The one thing I wish slack had was a way to mark comments as "decision points", much like what I heard stride was doing. Hopefully that'll get merged into slack after the buyout.
- swozey 8y ago
  I've taken up almost refusing to use email (I'm in engineering if it matters). I'll write RFOs and that sort of "report" portion via email, write HR, etc, or communicate outside of the company with it but I'll go days now without even opening my inbox. I am absolutely up-front about it as well and mention it to my managers and other engs and a lot of them say the same thing. Either the companies I've worked for over the last 10 years have gone more and more that route or the fact that I don't check email is causing people to not email me. It's fabulous.
subpixel 8y ago
"...the vast majority of summer Fridays were spent in deep work, strategic thinking, or learning a new skill. When the team was surveyed each Monday, no one ever reported taking the Friday fully off." This made me chuckle. What do you expect employees to say in that situation?
pcmaffey 8y ago
"A tool's utility is directly proportionate to the skill of the one wielding it." -Anon
luckydata 8y ago
Slack is a cancer, I said it publicly in multiple avenues and I still believe it's fundamentally true. I hate it and I hope it went away. At this point it's the digital equivalent of open spaces.
milansm 8y ago
Shameless plug, but this synchronous vs asynchronous communication is exactly what I wanted to solve with my Slack app (https://www.qdochat.com/ https://www.qdochat.com/). I was thinking of building a chat-like communication tool, but to be asynchronous by design. I settled with the Slack app for the time being.
- im3w1l 8y ago
  Your plug is ineffective, because after reading this comment I still have no idea what your app does.
  - milansm 8y ago
    Yes, you're right. Your comment is much appreciated. I'll certainly act upon it and work on improving my (personal project) marketing skills. BTW, put simply, qdochat.com is Pomodoro technique for Slack teams.
zby 8y ago
15 years ago I thought that we are soon going to use our communication tools in an informed manner - what needs synchronicity will be done on IMs, what is more conversational, but not synchronous, will stay email, things that are more contextual will move to wikis, we'll have general pub-sub infrastructure where the sender and the receiver would have means to negotiate what gets through. But now I learned that channel stickiness is much bigger than I thought.
xte 8y ago
Any "big" try to offer "emails alternative" simply because emails are free, interoperable and decentralized, something IT's bigs do really dislike. They want control and they want people live on their platform not on their own world. That's why we do not have any modern MUA for non techies, that's why there is a big push to web-crap stuff. That's why there is a big push toward centralization instead of cooperation and "power/responsibility division". People today do not even realize that we are in process to became new illiterate, even loosing writing (on keyboard eh!) ability in favor of audio/video contents, the new "oral system".
qbaqbaqba 8y ago
This date uses insane amount of notifications! Tell me more about removing distractions!
jvagner 8y ago
Work with entirely remote staff.. I'll take the pain of Slack over the pain of 5+ hours of voice conferencing days, anytime. Where's the "We had Skype/GTM/Hangouts/call-free days" articles?
gnulinux 8y ago
In my current work we use Zulip and I'm very happy. I'm one of those people who is fine with most stuff and never complain so you wouldn't read a complaint of zulip from me but I honestly really like it. We get real time errors and alarms in dev systems and prob via zulip and its asynchronous model works super good.

108 points by prostoalex 8y ago

Honestly, I never viewed Slack as synchronous. I kept all notifications off, and checked it whenever I had a few minute break or wanted to catch up on our office's conversation. Slack allowed anyone to contact me by tagging me or @here, so it was obvious when someone wanted it to be synchronous (therefore breaking my communication), but the grand majority of communication was asynchronous unlike email - which does a poor job of differentiating between messages that should (and shouldn't) break attention.

lordnacho 8y ago
I work fully remote and that's what I think as well. It's a thing that let's you wait or respond immediately, up to you. That's the major selling point. Depends on company culture, of course. But my team is also distributed from -8 to + 10 UTC. So nobody is expecting someone who is asleep to write back to them. Another thing to note is the presence of other sources of communication, like GitLab issues. If you have those you don't always have to ping a live person in sync mode. Often you can just pick up an issue and do it with minimal input.
- xte 8y ago
  Hem, plain classic emails offer the very same thing: it's up to you respond quickly or leave the message behind... IMAP IDLE is not exactly a new thing...
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    As does snail mail. But I think by now the benefits of a chatroom UX are clearly valued by a lot of people.
    - xte 8y ago
      Mh, perhaps lot of people who never tried good modern MUA like notmuch-emacs or mu4e or perhaps even mutt&forks of pine&forks... I still have to find a webui more effective than my notmuch-emacs UI (with, of course, notmuch underneath)...
draw_down 8y ago
At least for me, the whole problem with Slack is how many/how often I get @mentions or DMs, not the other stuff. Sure the other stuff is async, that’s not really the issue at least for me and lots of others
mooreds 8y ago
That is the first thing I do when I install a slack client at a new job. Turn off all the notifications. Then I check it when it makes sense for me. I give team members my phone number and say "text me if you need something ASAP". People don't do that unless it really is important, in my experience.
dawhizkid 8y ago
Same. I have Slack on my phone but I refuse to enable notifications. I open it when I choose to and respond when I can/if I need to.
why_only_15 8y ago
They mentioned this in the article - "Slack is capable of being both sync and async, though we’ve noticed that there does seem to be some social expectation of a quick response on Slack regardless of how explicitly we state otherwise."
lxmorj 8y ago
I really wish they had @ and @-whenever-you-get-to-it tags

ebzlo 8y ago

I think the distinction between async and sync messaging is really critical here and highlights a different form of communication that folks are incorrectly using Slack to solve. When I was at Facebook, this type of communication was extremely abundant and took place on Workplace. When you are pushed information, there is some expectation to respond (as highlighted by the author). However, Workplace's opt-in type of communication via feed didn't have this problem. And interestingly isn't really prevalent outside forums and groups (which I don't think are used commonly at companies). I think splitting out that kind of behavior was beneficial, it wasn't email (which is a push that people ignore), but rather a subscribe where there was no stigma to be late, and people could take their own time to catch up on posts.

matchbok 8y ago
Exactly. 99% of workplace coms don't need to be synchronous. Slack assumes that they do. Thus you get tons of noise and chatter and the feeling that you have to check it all the time. Hell, even the idea of a chat room isn't productive to getting "work" done at all IMO. If you aren't watching it every minute, you immediately lose all the context and knowledge. It's such a waste.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  But it means everybody has to keep one eye on Slack at all times, which translates into huge "engagement" numbers for Slack. So "synchronous everything" may be bad for you, but it's great for them!
- sotojuan 8y ago
  Nah. Just turn off all notifications outside of mentions. If people want to reach you they can mention or message you. I do this and don’t check Slack for hours or even a whole day. Most problems people have with Slack are people problems.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I'm not on Slack, we have Lync or whatever Microsoft calls it now at work. I have all notifications off, so I only notice new messages when I bring that window to the foreground.

ddtaylor 8y ago

A bit off-topic but the nagging and distracting on that website is insufferable. Firefox reader mode did a great job of cleaning it up and making it readable.

jakobegger 8y ago
I really wonder how a website can end up looking like this: https://i.imgur.com/GL2buwD.png https://i.imgur.com/GL2buwD.png
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  Holy cow, I didn't even see a few of those probably because of blockers I have installed. That's even worse than what I was seeing.
- pragmatick 8y ago
  Well, the top and bottom notifications are probably due to GDPR. But the one on the left is horrible, yes.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    I'm not sure how being related to GDPR somehow makes them okay? It's still a crappy experience.

matchbok 8y ago

Productivity would go even higher if you stopped using for the other 4 days. Synchronous chatrooms have very little work value in my experience. You either miss out on a ton of information from all the people chatting or you have to watch it every minute for updates. Nonsense.

nerdponx 8y ago
Agreed. Synchronous chat is good for small teams who are working on the same thing at the same time, and for banter during lunch break.
- matchbok 8y ago
  Yeah. All jokes aside, Slack is really only good for slacking off.
tootie 8y ago
Then you haven't balanced the size of your rooms. Slack should be your first and primary communication channel and there's a load of good reasons. For one, you can never guarantee nor should you expect your team to be colocated. Even if you have one office, people should be free to work from home. Side chats get lost, people forget or don't hear. Slack is public and searchable. No mumbling and if you mistype, you can fix it. Plus you can add documents, links, images while you're talking. People say getting communication on their phones is like an anchor to their desk but I feel the exact opposite. It means I can leave my desk anytime I want and not be out of communication. If something critical needs my attention, I can answer while I'm home and not go back to work.
- twbarber 8y ago
  > People say getting communication on their phones is like an anchor to their desk I’ve been struggling with this lately, to the point where I’ve experimented with going back to a dumb phone, and trying to use my smart phone without Slack. As a remote employee, I think having Slack on mobile has lead to a greater degree of freedom, as you mentioned, but I also wonder if the constant tether is leading me to burnout more quickly.

zwayhowder 8y ago

> 4. A CASUALTY: “CHECK OUT THIS ARTICLE I SAW” Wait what? If only there was some application out there that could queue up article sharing to an appropriate time.

yaseer 8y ago
This made me lol, but also reflect. I bet the people that championed this deep work experiment, ironically, do not like social media for its distracting effects. It's the main reason I stay off social media.
- nerpderp83 8y ago
  You are on social media right now.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Yes and no. HN is definitely social, but there are no friends, no feeds, and no notifications, so it's unlike social media as most people understand the term. If I skip HN for a day, there's a whole front page of articles that I'll probably never see, and never know that I missed.
  - vokep 8y ago
    Sorta...yes it is media as it is information transferred over a medium..but I think nerdponx is excluding this because its more 'social internet' than social media. With social media, you are like a company, with your brand, that you are trying to ensure looks good and shows good collaboration with other companies. With social internet, you are a human talking to other humans through technology.
groundCode 8y ago
Exactly what I thought when I read that. I wonder how much stopping slack meant they all just jumped on twitter

docker_up 8y ago

I think a no-Hacker-News or no-reddit day would be far more productive for me.

ry_ry 8y ago
I spend more time knowingly slacking off than I do reading slack. Then again I fully subscribe to the '4 hours of full productivity per day' theory.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Is that a real theory? Seems to totally fit how I work!
invalidOrTaken 8y ago
We(as in HN) should have a no-HN day.

sokoloff 8y ago

Most used Slack channels at our company: #freefood<location>

ergothus 8y ago

I'm shocked at many of the responses here, when people will also complain about hostility towards remote workers. Slack is a vital part of my working, PARTICULARLY when one of the parties is remote. Sure, as this article is saying, having some space to not be interrupted is a good thing - but that's hardly the same as saying USUALLY having no synchronous option is good, much less EVER having a synchronous option. 1) Email was great...until too much crap showed up in email and people stopped reading it. Remove the synchronous option and you'll just have another form of email. The Mythical Man Month talks about communication overhead - 2) The vast bulk of my slack communication is quick questions/answers. Sure, an interruption is annoying, but usually well worth it if it unblocks someone. (and when that someone is me, I value it much more). The value here tends to vary in proportion to someone's quick response time. I have a few coworkers that wont' check Slack more than once or twice a day. I hate having to work with them on anything, and we tend to have more scheduled meetings that are far less efficient. Others can be counted on to respond within 10 mins, and usually within a min - working with them is a breeze. There is definitely a number of tricks to adopt and etiquette to follow...just like any form of communication. It can be used poorly and have more costs than benefits, or well and have the reverse. My tricks: * I replaced the default notification sound with something less jarring. Basically a gentle sound that clues me in to glance at the notification. If it's not something I need to respond to, I'm usually not pulled out of flow. This is a huge difference. * When that notification is still too much, and/or someone starts a detailed chat about something I don't care about, `/dnd 10min` tells slack to shut up for a bit, without me having to tinker with settings and worry about remembering to UN-tinker those settings. * If using a Pomodoro technique, add in a scan of Slack between sessions. That's fast enough that most people are happy and not blocked long, but doesn't break up your work efforts. This advice is only partially tested, as I'm still struggling to adopt a routine. * Many people will tell you to turn off notifications - I recommend AGAINST this unless you're using a technique like the last to make sure you don't miss things. Instead, make sure you're only in channels that are relevant to you - if you're getting pinged and aren't interested, the problem is not the tool. In particular, you want to manage the expectations about reaching you - if people think you aren't responding, they'll just get more annoying, not patient. I have coworkers that will often join into channels for related teams, get their answers, then leave...a process they repeat possibly multiple times that day, while I hang out in many, many channels. Both ways do the job well. * I gave a presentation where I worked on effective ways to communicate with text. One of the best is to not ask A or B questions - instead ask yes/no questions. Not: "Is the API key for foobar still in file.env? Or is it from the new service call?" (You will be told "Yes" or "no" and have no idea what the actual answer is) Instead: "The API key for foobar is still in file.env? And not yet from the new service call?" ("yes" or "no" will have a clear meaning) This technique alone has taken a big bite out of my frustrations in using slack (and any other communication) and reduced unnecessary traffic, though it takes some practice. I responded to Slack pings in the course of writing this :)

starshadowx2 8y ago

In my experience the use of a chatroom has been nothing but positive. We use Google Chat and it's largely where I do most of my work even. I'm able to talk to any person in the organization (which is very spread out physically) instantly. All of my coworkers share information and ask each other questions either directly or in our shared rooms and all of that can be easily searched and found by anyone else who needs it. Maybe it's just something Chat does better than Slack (no experience with it) but I can mute any person, room, or conversation in a room. Personally I don't use sound notifications so maybe that's more of a bother. Since Chat is just a tab I have open I can just look up and see the icon colour change when something new shows up (blue for new message, red for new direct message). All of this also really hinges on the type of work you do I guess as well.

mattmanser 8y ago
We use Google Chat and it's largely where I do most of my work even Most of us here have jobs where our actual work needs to be done outside of chat rooms.
- starshadowx2 8y ago
  >All of this also really hinges on the type of work you do I guess as well.

dleslie 8y ago

BaseCamp + Slack has been a general win for us. We use BaseCamp for anything that should have any temporal meaning beyond the present, and Slack for water-cooler conversation, coordinating tests, coordinating releases, hot-topic issues, and similar. Basically, anything that is best served with a post-mortem or no record at all goes in Slack. Slack can be totally ignored and one can remain a positively contributing member of the team; but it exists because we're social mammals and we _don't have an office_. Slack _shouldn't_ be ignored because it is a place of coordination and rapid response, but it _can_ be if one wants to focus on a particular task. That said, Slack's VoIP for meetings sucks when you have more than a half-dozen people.

rprime 8y ago
I've been looking to ditch Slack in favor of Basecamp, isn't Campfire enough to replace Slack?
- dleslie 8y ago
  We tried campfire and found that mapping chat to projects didn't make sense when what we really wanted was an office banter space. It was even harder to track meaningful conversations! Also, not enough fun integrations for our team. We have all sorts of custom bots, emoji, and such. ;)
seppin 8y ago
Slack + Trello for the money minded, works great.

weliketocode 8y ago

I'll take slack over email by a country mile. A lot (maybe even most or all) of the negativity around slack in this thread is from misuse. Slack is a tool. If it's becoming a distraction, change your approach.

moorhosj 8y ago
Email is also a tool that can be misused.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  So is a circular saw. But between the 3 options, one is a clear winner for the topic at hand.
paulie_a 8y ago
Out of the incredible volume of emails I get, if it's important I'll either be watching for it. Or someone will instantly come over to my desk asking if I looked at it. this seems to be a trend at every company I've worked at dating back to 90s.
Benjammer 8y ago
>misuse You mean, using it how the designers expressly intend it to be used?

p1necone 8y ago

I don't get the slack hate. It's just a chatroom, if your team is using it in a way that impedes productivity that's on you. Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately every time there's new conversation happening.

Benjammer 8y ago
>Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately Ugh this is such a common strawman for why most people criticize Slack. I've never heard someone say "Slack has a weird magical power over me where I'm physically incapable of _not_ checking the notifications." What people are saying is that Slack _encourages_ synchronous communication through it's explicit design choices. Why do people want to use a tool where you have to exert conscious effort to deviate from the designer's intentions in order to get value from the product?
- marktangotango 8y ago
  IMO it’s the fear of missing a direct message from my boss is why I feel the need to check every notification immediately. I don’t know that he expects instant responses from the team, but he hasn’t said otherwise, either. Ideally there’s a culture where high priority is @here and non urgent is email. I have not seen this in practice.
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    I've been taken to task in the past by a boss who sits behind me because I ignored a chat message. So yeah that threat is real but maybe us pions are to blame and we need to "grow some" not put up with it and be prepared to instaquit if necessary. I get the feeling in most countries the demand for developers (etc...) is fierce.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      More to the point, if your boss is an asshole they can be an asshole without slack/chat

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

paulie_a 8y ago

Slack is good for group messaging for a real time chat about an issue that will get resolved hopefully in the next few hours, coordinating lunch orders, posting random YouTube videos, news articles and memes. There are focused channels on dealing with specific projects that can be productive. But those are lesser utilized. The daily stand-up channel, only a couple people actually read them. For actual stand-ups, every one is checked out. Slack is nice for a few things because email is useless with thousands of emails that are irrelevant. On the plus side I'm glad I don't have a work voicemail anymore. At a previous company the owner would forward 30 minute recordings of a conversation, for 3 years I just deleted every voicemail. It actually never caused a problem. Every day I'd have 8-10 voicemails waiting, every day I just hit 7, 8-10 times. People over communicate but say nothing important and it just adds noise.

Benjammer 8y ago

"But you don't _have_ to do X" "But you _could_ use it like Y" Stop with this. Why are you trying to force the square peg into the round hole so hard? Why do people like the idea of using Slack against how it's designed? These arguments are so tiresome.

RHSeeger 8y ago
Can you explain why you think Slack is designed to be synchronous and have people constantly checking it? I don't feel like to pushes me in that direction at all.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  Because its design primarily pushes sync and while you can do async with it, many bosses treat is as an instant messenger.

stephengillie 8y ago

The worst part of a synchronous chatroom is repeatedly asking for something you need now - and getting drowned out by irrelevant conversations, other tech chats, and cat gifs. Because you need the PR to finish the ticket and go home. But 2 people who are done for the day are still discussing house siding with a remote dev.

crooked-v 8y ago
That's what separate channels are for.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  You're suggesting to start a new channel just for the PR?
  - learc83 8y ago
    I think they're suggesting seperate channels for the non work related stuff. Or just smaller channels in general.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      And how do you expect to get the siding discussion into the other channel if you can't get their attention?
      - learc83 8y ago
        It's not a one time deal. You have to set the expectation that some channels are for work only, some channels are for off-topic discussions. You might need someone with some authority to help with this. I take charge of managing some of the slack channels at my company, and we're able to keep the off-topic conversation mostly contained.
- allannienhuis 8y ago
  Isn't that what direct messages are for?

keithnz 8y ago

Where I work Slack gets a little bit of use for some semi synchronous conversations. Not a lot. The rest of the time it's mostly a way to copy paste things to other people... links, code snippets, log files, screen shots

wpietri 8y ago

From what I've experienced, slack is to the virtual company what the open office plan is to physical offices. Cheap, easy, and in many ways pleasant, but having everyone present in the same space makes it very hard to focus. For centuries tech has been about making everything easier, faster, more connected. IMHO, next we have to thoughtfully and discerningly step back from that where it isn't helping. As an example, for the last 30 days I've stopped looking at news and Twitter before noon. They put me in a fast-paced, reactive, what's-next mindset. Leaving them until later means I'm more focused and less tense. I'm doing it for at least another 30 days.

Alex3917 8y ago
> makes it very hard to focus. Companies don't go out of business because employees are distracted by chat messages and noisy conversations, they go out of business because employees are working on the wrong thing. Slack still has a lot of work to do if they really want to succeed in their mission, but I also don't think it's entirely fair to judge them (excessively) negatively based on it being distracting because that's not the point.
- mijamo 8y ago
  Thatvis a strawman. Open spaces don't make companies go bankrupt either. Yoi could also say Slack does not cause nuclear wars, which is also true but also not the point. Slack was supposed to be a progress compared to other communications channels, for instance mails, phone calls and previous IRC channels. My takeaway from Slack is that it is very nice for chatting casually and organizing lunches, but it does a poor job at improving professional communication. I sometimes feel its appeal is mostly gifs for fun and the ability for managers to ping people and expect immediate answers.
- wpietri 8y ago
  > entirely fair to judge them (excessively) negatively This is tautological. Maybe try expressing this more usefully? > Companies don't go out of business because employees are distracted by chat messages and noisy conversations Why not? Unending distraction raises costs and encourages a focus on the urgent rather than the important. That will raise prices and lower the company's ability to do strategic rather than tactical work. That seems like a major risk to me. I agree that there are risks the other direction as well. A company can become too insular or too scattered. But that doesn't mean that one can ignore the opposite risks. > being distracting because that's not the point I agree that's not the point for them. But as a user, it's definitely a point for me. And if you're looking for ways that companies go out of business, doing what they want rather than what the user needs is a common one.

kapauldo 8y ago

It's not obvious to me why anyone uses slack

throwaway-18 8y ago

I'm inbox zero type of personality and my workplace is incredibly email heavy. Reply-All with far more people than need be present is commonplace and it almost feels taboo to remove someone. What you end up with in a situation like that is inbox overload, synchronous conversations in email and lots of anxiety because now I have 2,000 emails in my "inbox" and just the thought of categorizing them now exhausts me. For that type of culture, I much prefer slack. The synchronous conversation can happen, you can choose to pay attention or not and, generally, someone will @ you if they really need your input. The one thing I wish slack had was a way to mark comments as "decision points", much like what I heard stride was doing. Hopefully that'll get merged into slack after the buyout.

swozey 8y ago
I've taken up almost refusing to use email (I'm in engineering if it matters). I'll write RFOs and that sort of "report" portion via email, write HR, etc, or communicate outside of the company with it but I'll go days now without even opening my inbox. I am absolutely up-front about it as well and mention it to my managers and other engs and a lot of them say the same thing. Either the companies I've worked for over the last 10 years have gone more and more that route or the fact that I don't check email is causing people to not email me. It's fabulous.

subpixel 8y ago

"...the vast majority of summer Fridays were spent in deep work, strategic thinking, or learning a new skill. When the team was surveyed each Monday, no one ever reported taking the Friday fully off." This made me chuckle. What do you expect employees to say in that situation?

pcmaffey 8y ago

"A tool's utility is directly proportionate to the skill of the one wielding it." -Anon

luckydata 8y ago

Slack is a cancer, I said it publicly in multiple avenues and I still believe it's fundamentally true. I hate it and I hope it went away. At this point it's the digital equivalent of open spaces.

milansm 8y ago

Shameless plug, but this synchronous vs asynchronous communication is exactly what I wanted to solve with my Slack app (https://www.qdochat.com/ https://www.qdochat.com/). I was thinking of building a chat-like communication tool, but to be asynchronous by design. I settled with the Slack app for the time being.

im3w1l 8y ago
Your plug is ineffective, because after reading this comment I still have no idea what your app does.
- milansm 8y ago
  Yes, you're right. Your comment is much appreciated. I'll certainly act upon it and work on improving my (personal project) marketing skills. BTW, put simply, qdochat.com is Pomodoro technique for Slack teams.

zby 8y ago

15 years ago I thought that we are soon going to use our communication tools in an informed manner - what needs synchronicity will be done on IMs, what is more conversational, but not synchronous, will stay email, things that are more contextual will move to wikis, we'll have general pub-sub infrastructure where the sender and the receiver would have means to negotiate what gets through. But now I learned that channel stickiness is much bigger than I thought.

xte 8y ago

Any "big" try to offer "emails alternative" simply because emails are free, interoperable and decentralized, something IT's bigs do really dislike. They want control and they want people live on their platform not on their own world. That's why we do not have any modern MUA for non techies, that's why there is a big push to web-crap stuff. That's why there is a big push toward centralization instead of cooperation and "power/responsibility division". People today do not even realize that we are in process to became new illiterate, even loosing writing (on keyboard eh!) ability in favor of audio/video contents, the new "oral system".

qbaqbaqba 8y ago

This date uses insane amount of notifications! Tell me more about removing distractions!

jvagner 8y ago

Work with entirely remote staff.. I'll take the pain of Slack over the pain of 5+ hours of voice conferencing days, anytime. Where's the "We had Skype/GTM/Hangouts/call-free days" articles?

gnulinux 8y ago

In my current work we use Zulip and I'm very happy. I'm one of those people who is fine with most stuff and never complain so you wouldn't read a complaint of zulip from me but I honestly really like it. We get real time errors and alarms in dev systems and prob via zulip and its asynchronous model works super good.