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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 offic

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

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