15 ms·

Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

381 points by zzaner 7y ago

osmyn 7y ago
This is a big reason behind why I created https://ourtimetothink.com https://ourtimetothink.com - a tool for teams on Slack to manage their DND status for scheduled blocks of time each day so they can get some deep work done
exachtly 7y ago
This article seems to be unaware that there are many jobs which exist solely for doing shallow work. I'd say for most "knowledge work" or "white collar" jobs shallow work is the point. A job that demands deep work consistently is pretty rare (see: Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber). In that respect, Slack is a perfect fit for most employees.
jayjaybinks 7y ago
This is exactly why we switched to Twist. Slack is fun but toxic. Working in an open office is bad enough but at least you can use noise canceling headphones. No such remedy for Slack.
- zzaner 7y ago
  Wish we could as well, but I don't see our management giving up Slack any time soon. "So connected! So collaborative!" Ugh.
- throwaway2016a 7y ago
  I think the equivalent is snoozing notifications. If it is important people can "notify anyway" -- however, your world culture needs to be OK with that.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  I’d rather close Slack, or snooze notifications, than wear headphones all day.
- codingdave 7y ago
  This is a cultural problem. You can close Slack. You can check it every couple hours and catch up. You can turn off notifications. If your management has problems with this, that is a problem with their culture, not the tool. We have channels where discussions will spread over multiple days because there simply is no expectation that Slack is real-time.
  - te_chris 7y ago
    Nah, it's just a bad product that demands too much attention by design.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      What do you mean by "demands"? You can react to a notification or not. You can reduce the notifications. Slack itself doesn't force you to do anything.
  - amichal 7y ago
    Indeed. There are 80+ channels in my workplace of 20 people. Most people are subscribed to just a few relevant to their current projects and there is zero expectation that a non direct message will be read by subscribers until they are next focused on the project. It serves a semi public record of what’s going on and a place for questions, notifications of important updates. It makes it easier for me to focus on work not harder since I can drop out for hours or days and trust that I can come back and be well informed.
    - grogenaut 7y ago
      We have around 6k channels for our 1500 employees. I have around 60 I'm in that I need to pay some level of attention to or that I'll get Facebook defriend shamed for leaving. Conversations happen instantly and at odd hours and decisions are made and then scrolled past. Each team I work with has at least 3 channels, public, private, oncall/cr. Often an additional one per micro service. It's a mess.
- upofadown 7y ago
  Isn't Twist just threaded email?
rohtul 7y ago
“Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.” That. So true.
- vishnu_ks 7y ago
  Try Zulip. All meetings have an agenda! https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh Long Version: In Zulip, each and every conversation in a channel has a topic. So for catching up one don't have to go through all messages in a channel. Instead just go through the topic names and open the topics only you are interested in catching up. Since each conversation can have a topic you can reply back to conversations even after days as well as can have multiple productive conversations in one channel at same time! https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/
  - thecatspaw 7y ago
    Or continue using slack, but correctly. We dont have offtopic in ours. We do have a #random chat, but its very infrequently used. Instead of zulips revolutionary tags, just use the slack threads. Zulip wont save you if you're drowning in Slack messages.
    - vishnu_ks 7y ago
      Zulip does save you from drowning in messages! Instead of going through all the messages, one just have to go through Topics and consume messages only from topics they are interested in. This is so much efficient compared to a chat system without topics :)
      - thecatspaw 7y ago
        Slack also has channels.
        vishnu_ks 7y ago
        Topics are not the same as channels. In Zulip each conversation in a channel would have a topic. A channel would be a collection of topics. You can ignore the topics you are not interested in and focus on topics that are relevant. So for catching up all you need to do is go through the topics in a channel instead of going through all the messages. https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh
woliveirajr 7y ago
I went on to favorite this one and saw that my last time favorite was this:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419649 I think it tells me something about a persistent problem, curiosity or struggle.
rob74 7y ago
"you could try the monastic approach, ditching the city for a gig as a caretaker at an isolated hotel" - you can read "The Shining" to see how that may turn out...
Hoasi 7y ago
> Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens Sure, but that's not the point, it is not even where "work" happens. Slack can be useful as a communication tool. There is a time for work and a time for communication. Just as you don't answer the phone when you want to do serious work. Likewise, meetings are a waste of time, except when meeting face to face is useful. Communication is super important. After all, without communication, there is no work. Tools designed to enhance communication impede it when used as surrogate management. If Slack must be open at all times, it turns into a distraction.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  I keep slack open for 20 minutes a day max, mostly in breaks between real work. I don't feel like I miss much.
te_chris 7y ago
When I joined the startup I work at currently I had one key criteria: no Slack. We first tried Zulip, but the interface is a mess and everyone hated it. We've since switched to Twist and it is brilliant. The threaded model is genuinely useful for ongoing discussions, and then group chat for small messages. But the key effect is this: by being simple and utilitarian, people only use it for utility. No endless gif streams, no all day shit chat. It's great. Messaging is genuinely useful for a productive org, Slack doesn't event come close to providing this. As far as a better interface for IRC goes, it's good for that, the various industry groups I'm in are good, but for work? It's a tire fire.
king_magic 7y ago
Slack/Teams/etc. are the bane of my work existence. I will only open them when I absolutely need to. The distraction is too high and the utility is too low for it to be worth using.
w8rbt 7y ago
Reminds me of this Knuth quote, "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Source: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- shubhamjain 7y ago
  To me, this can be taken as an argument against the post's premise. Could there be any e-communication tool more asynchronous than email? (Except for notifications, which you can turn off). I am not blaming Knuth, he must really dislike distraction of any sort. However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period, I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk to ask the question (vastly more distracting). We had meetings for tiny questions and they stretched far too long. The culture of company that is far more responsible than any single tool.
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    There are a variety of communication methods: - Face to face - Phone call - Text message - Slack - Email - Publication/memo The rank corresponds to distraction, synchronicity, time to compose/respond, latency, and importance. Done well, Slack is a nice layer between a 10-minute email that might be forwarded on to some customer, and an "OK for demo Monday?" text message. You can include screenshots, links, spreadsheets, etc. The problem seems to come up when it's assumed to be lower-latency and higher-priority than it is. I can take a 30-minute break every couple hours and answer a couple emails and a half dozen Slack pings, or you can interrupt me with a phone call or text that I can ignore or take and subsequently answer a quick Slack query, or you can come to my desk and bring something to my attention right now. If you think Slack is like talking to me or calling to me (or treat it like it has that real-time priority) you're going to have a significant new distraction.
  - Jedd 7y ago
    > However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period ... Perhaps I am (really) old, but pre slack is a blink of an eye ago. Also we are, sadly, not yet post-Slack. > ... I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk to ask the question (vastly more distracting). We had meetings for tiny questions and they stretched far too long. The culture of company that is far more responsible than any single tool. You're describing a work environment that bewildering appears to exclude email, or the option to explain to people how and when to use email.
rjdagost 7y ago
For myself, Slack is such a time waster that I'm at the point where I only check on it periodically. I tell coworkers that if there's an emergency that needs to be tended to right away, just text, call, or talk to me in person. If there's something that can wait, email is better. After 2+ years of using Slack on several different teams, I have yet to see any enhanced group communications. I do however see massive amounts of distractions and failed concentration. I'm sure "I'm doing it wrong", but this has been my experience with Slack.
- fs2 7y ago
  My experience exactly. The most common observation with Slack is how people praise it as the next big thing in productivity. But this is always during the honeymoon phase, after a few months of working with Slack it usually quickly wears off.
  - rjdagost 7y ago
    I think the worst part of it (as the article mentions) is that it feels like you are doing something productive when you're using Slack, but the majority of time you're actually not. You're generating conversations, notifications, and in general producing tangible output that for me is subconsciously gratifying. That hooks me in to using the service even though consciously I know that I'm not getting real work done.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      The benefit I've found is in cross-team communication. Specifically of the "I need to reach out to this team I don't know about their product" variety. A) If they interact with Slack, I can search previous answers B) It promotes a culture of openness. Huge benefit in some orgs! We talk about our projects, warts and all, in public channels. If all your org channels are private, you're definitely Doing It Wrong C) It's far more scalable than ticketing. Issues can be resolved in three lines of text, rather than ticket creation, queue, assignment, closing, etc. As an above commenter noted though, you can and should push back on expectations of constant availability. Slack is asynchronous, not for initiating hi-pri issues.
geekamongus 7y ago
I have to minimize Slack throughout the day in order to get work done, and I try to only pay attention to it when I hear the alert noise when someone @'s me, which unfortunately I mis-hear all the time. My brain thinks it hears that alert noise beneath the music I have playing, or if I go to the other room it thinks it hears it from afar, so I run back to my desk to see if someone is messaging me. I hate that I have been conditioned this way, but I don't foresee it changing in my workplace any time soon. Some people I work with are on Slack all day chatting, and I really question if they are ever doing anything else.
- jorisw 7y ago
  Can't you disable the sound, so that you know that when you think you hear it, it's not meant for you?
- justinclift 7y ago
  Is it feasible for you to disable notifications?
protonimitate 7y ago
I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of manually digging through several different web UIs or using a bunch of different CLIs, I can just take a look at the corresponding channel. - Notifications _can be_ non-distracting. Being the correct channels, snoozing alerts, or just exiting slack when you need the deep focus headspace, is easy. I specifically don't want to be called/texted/interrupted in person unless it's something severely important. 90% of the time its not. I would much rather ignore a slack notification than answer a meaningless phonecall, or politely tell someone to bug off in person. I will say, the "always on" culture is hard to face when Slack/group messaging is a companies main point of communication. Luckily, I've only ever been in places where its been understood that you are only expected to be responsive during your work day. But, I think the negative effects of the cost of distraction by slack are overblown. There are endless ways to be distracted these days, and Slack is not the worst thing out there. You can always just exit the program.
- smoe 7y ago
  Agreed. Its not just about the tool but how you use it. For us it actually helps to get less distracted. There are very few things that require a sub 3 hour reaction. So we just put a question in Slack even if it's for the person sitting right next to you. Eventually the person will answer when they have some time. Much better than constantly having someone tipping one your shoulder or calling you Just because you have instant messages doesn't mean you have to respond instantly. Disable notifications and checking every few hours is plenty enough. If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently.
  - MisterOctober 7y ago
    Yep, this is exactly how I use it at my office. Slack isn't where 'deep work' happens, it's one of the things that allows me to accomplish 'deep work' by reducing interruption and distraction.
aloukissas 7y ago
Coincidentally, I was just listening a podcast episode with the creator of Level (https://level.app/ https://level.app/), which was built to fix exactly all these issues mentioned in the article. I agree 100% with this - the culture of ASAP and the FOMO that's created if you're not always on Slack, prevents one from doing deep, meaningful work. I'm really looking forward to trying out Level.
- ptasker 7y ago
  We're currently using Level now and it's definitely different from Slack. I think the biggest issue we have with it at this point is that it's still in active development. It's also missing a lot of things that you take for granted with Slack. Things like auto-link expansion and third-party integrations of any kind.
swagatkonchada 7y ago
how about no notifications for messages unless the sender specifically says "send notification"?
pgm8705 7y ago
I'm wondering if team size is what makes slack such a pain for many posters. Slack is great for my 8 person remote company. I keep notifications off for channels that aren't directly related to my development responsibilities, but I value having access to them for review at the end of the day so I'm aware of what is happening elsewhere. If I need a long stretch of uninterrupted development time, I turn on Do Not Disturb and everyone knows not to override this unless there is an emergency.
guaka 7y ago
Neither is Hacker News.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  I'm not required to use HN by my job. I am required to be available on slack.
athenot 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Webex Teams, another collab tool. I think a lot of this depends a lot more on the expectations of the whole group. This needs to be defined at an org level and well understood by everyone. It's not so much the tool as how it's used. There is now a continuum of interactions: - FYIs that are put out in a topical chat. You get to those when you have a moment, when you go through your unread rooms to catch up. Same for topics that you are only peripherally following. Time is not of the essence there. Zero interruption here and no expectation for you to be always listening. - Topical chats where you are @-mentionned. This is where a conversation that you're not actively following suddenly took a turn where your input is sollicited. But since you see the topic of the room, you are in control about whether it's worth an interruption. The group's expectation is that the person that was mentionned will join the conversation IF they are not in the middle of something (assuming the topic is not alarmist). - New rooms that got created around a topic or you getting added to an existing room. Basically it's similar to the above, where you're getting dragged into a conversation. - 1:1 chats with specific requests. Again, it depends who it's from, you triage based on origin. But the expectation is already managed at our group level. In all these modes, you can chose to accept the interruption or defer it. The deeper your work, the more likely you can defer it. We can operate like this because we have the nuclear option we can always use when it's actually needed: PagerDuty. This brings a few benefits: the person paging a team or another individual is aware that they are putting a burden of urgency and there's a recorded audit log of that page. So it's not used lightly. Once you've accepted the interruption though, you still get to control its modality. - Very often, a "hey, quick question" can turn into something WAY larger than the requester could imagine. That's when we point them to creating a Jira ticket, effectively punting a synchronous interruption into an asynchronous unit of work. Or you can tell the requester to schedule a meeting to work more deeply on that. (Related topic: ALWAYS have at least one day where it is forbidden to schedule meetings, accros the whole org.) - If the request is about an urgent matter, we just do an instant video meeting within Webex Teams. That converts long drawn out chats into quick visual meetings where the nuances are better expressed. Because in a long chat, the mind is already interrupted, so having to wait for typing and confirming nuance ends up taking a lot of time.
atoav 7y ago
I like email more than Slack for asynchrounous communication, Signal more than Slack for one-on-one or small group and IRC better than Slack for bigger groups or topic based conversations. I tried to like it. I am a young person for whom IRC and Email seem very oldfashioned. But hey, it works and doesn't get me distracted.
skc 7y ago
The only time I ever see positive views on Slack here is when Microsoft Teams is brought up :D
- Kiro 7y ago
  It's because HN is a stereotypical echo chamber where the correct opinion right now that fits the stereotype is to hate Slack.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    That added nothing to the conversation. HN may have a uniformity of opinion, because a large fraction of effective people in Software don't like something. That would be worth talking about. Ad Hominem attacks are pointless.
    - Frost1x 7y ago
      While his/her comment may have been narrowly directed and could even be bordering trolling/flame-baiting, it made me think about how the structure of discussion groups in general could encourage echo chambers. His/her comment is a case-in-point as it's being downvoted. I tend to believe discussion groups with comment voting systems (e.g., Reddit, Digg years ago) tend to further or more quickly close communication feedback loops that help lead to echo chambers: "what we like, what don't we like." People who want to actively engage will be more quickly discouraged if their perspectives differ and are quickly shunned, even if they're potentially valid. Those who remain will be conditioned with positive reinforcement when they repeat the status quo ("rewarded" with up-votes from peers). Comment voting systems tend to suppress perspectives that challenge the status quo in general (they can also promote challenges, though anecdotally, I observe this far less). Even without voting systems though, peer pressure in discussions shapes the discussions in a feedback loop that, in my opinion, leads to echo chambers of perspectives. Obviously the tradeoff is: what's the alternative? True garbage is posted that should be removed (spam, direct personal attacks, etc.). Moderator and editor systems shape discussions to their bias vs. a more distributed voting approach biases towards the status quo. Another option is to allow any perspective a perpetual voice (false negative spam and uncivil discussion emerges) which requires filtering/ignoring on a per participant/client basis (not good at promoting return visitors who want quality discussions), but this does allow exposure to new and differing perspectives. I'm not sure what the best solution is. As you pointed out, and I agree entirely with you, his/her comment certainly could have been presented better and didn't need to attack HN directly. At the very least, for me, it illustrates frustration as a symptom of a potentially systematic problem. Sometimes, I do wonder if "trolling" and "flamebaiting" often regarded as negative behaviors, are in reality healthy for discussion groups. They encourage a never ending revaluation (QA/QC, CD even) of ideologies adopted by the status quo and foster a competitive behavior of ideas using emotion for drive and momentum. I've read some of the best in-depth and even enlightening discussions spun out from such comments, once you get past initially emotionally fueled personal attacks. To be fair, I've also observed some of the most worthless volleyball of personal attacks. I suggest those disagreements and the emotional fuel help us push away complacency and strive for improvement instead of avoiding challenges. Without any emotion, few have desire to bpther exploring some ideas. Emotion isn't required to have a progressive discussion, but it seems to me to help light fires and engage more ideas, especially if done tastefully.
jackpeterfletch 7y ago
When I read these kind of pieces I wonder if people know that just because your company has Slack, that doesn't mean they expect you to read everything in it. Company wide/support channels, your basically at liberty to completely ignore these. Some people crack the odd joke in here, camaraderie in a team is nice, but don't feel its compulsory. I mute them, though they're are great places to be able to search! The channel for your immediate team/specific projects, your not obliged to monitor this but it'd probably be helpful for the team if you checked in twice a day or so, you might be able to guide or unblock a teammate with knowledge they don't know you have. And direct messages. Again, its up to your to triage these, if its unimportant just mark unread and come back later. The important point of slack is that communication is open, which brings network effects, I cant count the number of times I've stumbled on information that's been directly helpful to me. However, just like any other open information portal, most of it isn't directed at you, so don't worry about it.
- matchbok 7y ago
  But, the whole "checking in on a channel" thing is exactly the problem. It creates a nonsense or a "missing out" feeling for the team. It is too synchronous.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jackpeterfletch 7y ago
    So, I think the crux here, is that the below, in my opinion, is a purely perceived pressure. You shoulden't feel pressured to read everything in Slack. > Reduced pressure to read everything. Let’s face it, it’s not practical or necessary to keep up with every conversation. The aggregated timeline in Level lets you subscribe to channels and sip from the firehose of conversations without pressuring you to “catch up” on all unreads.
    - wool_gather 7y ago
      The fear of missing something is real. I have seen decisions taken in Slack by two or three of the four or five people who should have been involved. I'm not saying this is caused by Slack -- the problem is absolutely with the people who thought it was okay to act on such a decision. But I do think it's facilitated; the people involved seem to subconsciously think that because they're discussing in a public channel where the other people are "present" -- even though they're not active -- that everyone's informed. Whereas if they'd just had a hallway face-to-face, someone would have said, "Hey, we really need to check with Laura and Ed about this too".
zitterbewegung 7y ago
Slack is not a good product fit for every company . To be honest I think it can work for organizations under 20 people because startups were targeted first . If you want something that can scale then use discord or email/IM etc..
commandlinefan 7y ago
Deep work? We live in a world of open offices, daily standups, max-four-hour JIRA tickets and pair/mob programming. The people in charge don't believe that "deep work" even means anything.
- mateo411 7y ago
  This is true, but most if not all of these tasks don't require Deep Work. Cal Newport is an academic. It takes a lot of thought and a distraction free environment to write papers about CS Theory. Most people in these environments usually know how to write software. Most of the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep Work. The design of these systems requires more thought, but the implementation should be fairly straightforward once you have a plan.
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    > Most of the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep Work There's a self-fulfilling prophecy for you. We assume a priori that developing software doesn't require much thought, so we'll skimp on environmental factors that contribute to actual thought and see what programming we can get out of it. And lo and behold, if you ignore the usability problems, security problems, out-of-control memory problems and the necessity of an army of testers to make up for the fact that nobody actually understands the code, the resulting software kind-of sort-of meets the requirements so we were right, software CAN be reliably produced with zero concentration in an all-interruptions, all-the-time environment!
- ebiester 7y ago
  You really can get deep work done in pair and mob programming, especially when trained in it. Consider https://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programming-guy-steele-and.html https://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programm... as an example of how it can look. Mind you, I don't recommend 10 hour sessions ever, much less to begin. I find it odd to believe that intense, deep work can only happen in solo.
- justaaron 7y ago
OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
this new wave of chat clients is shit activity does not equal productivity
otabdeveloper1 7y ago
> Chatting online doesn't contribute to productive work. Wow, who knew, stop the presses and give this man a nobel!
nottorp 7y ago
I don't understand. Why do you allow Slack to interrupt you? Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it overflows. Easy as ABC. I run like 6 different messaging platforms, but none is allowed to interrupt me. If you can't restrain yourself from checking messages constantly, you have a problem not the medium.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  > Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it overflows. ...then keep a straight face while your super Agile manager berates you in front of the entire team because you're hard to communicate with, we have Slack for a reason. Not everyone has the choice to not allow Slack to interrupt you. Some organizations mandate this sort of communication, disruptive though it may be. Edit: just to clarify, I'm not in this situation :-D. But I've seen it happening.
  - ihuman 7y ago
    Then turn on notifications for when you are @mentioned, or specific important channels. If someone really wants to get your attention, they can. The noise is filtered out and doesn't reach you unless you reach for it.
  - cc81 7y ago
    If your nature of work is such that you need to be available then I get that your manager would berate you. It might not be what someone likes to do but for some it is better to be available to the team than to isolate themselves and work.
  - rbonvall 7y ago
    I understand the expectation of having the application open on your workstation while you're at the office, but having notifications enables on your personal phone is not sane.
- patwolf 7y ago
  I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. I say legitimate because it's not just missing out on inconsequential chatter. Slack is a business tool and business decisions get make over slack. The folks that read every messages and respond quickly are therefore the ones that get to contribute the most to decisions. When waiting too long to respond, the conversation has already changed and it's too late to contribute. And Slack's threads don't solve that problem IMHO.
PaulHoule 7y ago
I worked at a startup where we were always having a hard time finding documents and conversations. Almost every other week we would try or consider adding another place to store documents as a solution for this problem. I saw from the beginning that this made no sense at all, that adding a new sharing service could only make the problem worse but I could only slow this trend down. A real solution would involve an intelligent aggregator that sucks it down from those sources and imposes some structure on it together with you. For instance the python docs have everything you need to know about Python, Google and stack overflow are wrong at least half the time. So I build trails over the documents that get me to reference materials i need in 1 or 2 clicks. Control of document sharing is also a big thing in Biz. The star salesperson was trained as a lawyer. Ask him how to share a document and he will tell you to do it the same way my accountant does it. He doesn't mind it when I show him something in Github because he knows familiarity with Github gets him far in credibility with everybody. Elsewhere in the business people use Google Docs and also collaborate with the hugest businesses on Earth. People at those businesses might not believe Google Docs is secure and it is not good for the relationship when somebody shares a Google Doc in Google.
- atoav 7y ago
  I always had the feeling there are two ways to solve this: either you go full centralized and have ONE hub were everything important is stored and archived, or you store it right with the work (e.g. github issues, per project wiki, or in a folder directly in the project). What doesn't work is a in-between-solution where you have >5 places each with its own outdated fragments of nothingness. This means whenever you decide on something you just will have to bite the bullet and use a meaningful amount of time to get everything into the new system. When the new system works, it people are more likely to honor it than contributing into something they feel is broken and somehow meaningless.
robbiep 7y ago
We have a remote team and have recently implemented a rule/trial of no slack after 10am until 4pm - so everyone can organise, everyone has enough work to do during their 6 hrs to continue if the need to ask a question then have the afternoon to answer questions/move forward on any blockers from their ‘time out’ Early days but seems to be improving ‘distractability’
- delinka 7y ago
  Now to contend with "well, can't get an answer so I'm blocked until 4pm!" In the corporate environment I'm in, this is a fabulous excuse used by many teams from around the world. Works for email as well.
  - icholy 7y ago
    Then work on something else.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    If hard blockages are legitimately happening on a regular basis, being able to ping other people is not a solution to the actual organizational problem, it's just a band-aid.
  - robbiep 7y ago
    Well we’re a small team so that’s easier, and like I said it’s a trial. So we shall see!
icedchai 7y ago
Slack is fine if you turn off essentially all notifications. The same is true of email. Any sort of notification / alert is disruptive to deep (real) work. If it's urgent, send me a text. Or, god forbid, a phone call.
- rc_kas 7y ago
  I leave notifications on. But for christ sakes -- logout of the Slack app when you want to focus. I logout for long periods and then open it back up when I want to see what the rest of the team has going on.
matchbok 7y ago
Experiment for slack lovers: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Have another use try to start another conversation in the same channel. This is a common occurrence. The other users either have to spam the channel or wait until your topic is complete, which could never be! What happens? Garbage. Chat is not how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.
- smolder 7y ago
  There are a few ways of dealing with this that I've seen. On IRC, when a direct back-and-forth starts, etiquette is to name the other party specifically at the start of each line. Every client I've used will highlight those lines where your name is mentioned, making it easier to pick out your thread of conversation. The text is typically packed in pretty tight as well, which makes this more feasible in busy channels since you're not likely to have to scroll. Some clients also have a separate UI section for messages that target you, making it even easier to follow. In Slack, the chat contents are shown in a less dense way (more whitespace & separation, big user icons,) but they found a solution that seems to work pretty well, which is the 'thread' feature. (This is pretty recent AFAIK.) Threads stay collapsed for people who aren't participating and pop out for people who want to. While they are pretty much inevitable, multiple orthogonal conversations happening in a channel might also sometimes be a call for reorganization or sidebar channels/group chats. As an aside, one of my favorite experiences relating to chat is having multiple concurrent conversations with the same person or people, on different topics, in their respective channels. It highlights how bizarre the rapid context-switching pattern you fall into with chat applications is.
mindcrime 7y ago
I'm not a fan of Slack in particular just because it's a closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden. But that aside, while it is true that "Chat / IM apps are not where 'deep work' happens", that doesn't mean that chat / IM isn't valuable. You just have to recognize it for what it is, and figure out how to tap into the value that it represents. If that means turning it all off at certain times to support "deep work" then so be it. The question, in my mind, is how to find the optimal balance between synchronous, interrupt-driven communication and asynchronous communication. I'm not sure anybody has figured out the perfect answer for that yet.
- beat 7y ago
  The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times?
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times? Hand them a copy of Deep Work? Also, don't just turn it off... announce to the group "Hey guys, I'm going offline to do deep work for the next 3 hours. Only interrupt me if the building is on fire, OK?" or something like that. Set a status or "away message" that says "offline for focused deep work right now. Interrupt only for absolute emergencies." or something similar.
    - beat 7y ago
      Sure, technically it can be done. Socially, though... we have a hard time saying no to people. That's a lot to overcome. We have tools for interruption and social inhibitions against not using them.
      - mindcrime 7y ago
        Agreed. That's why I find it easier if you announce ahead of time, "hey guys, I'm going offline for a while to focus on $SOME_SPECIFIC_THING". At least with the places I've worked, and the cultures I've worked in, I've found that people (usually) respect that.
beat 7y ago
It's not just Slack. It's our phones! Notifications are distraction engines. At the beginning of March, I went cold turkey on most social media (I still allow myself HN and a guitar player's forum), and completely cold turkey on using my phone for these things - I have to use an actual computer. I put Kindle where Facebook used to be on my phone, and always have a book on it that can be read in small bites for those "OMG I AM BORED FOR TWO MINUTES" moments, and I carry a Kindle Paperwhite with longer-form reading for lunchtime and such. My brain feels amazingly different. I'm more aware and happier. I'm getting more work done. My stress levels are way down. My book-reading rate has at least tripled. This article refers a lot to Cal Newport's excellent Deep Work, but I wish it also referred to his more recent Digital Minimalism, which is full of useful advice for limiting the ways social media and instant messaging undermine our productivity and happiness.
- chungleong 7y ago
  The thing that I really miss about old Windows Phone is the lack of notifications. They're almost never that time critical. Having the same info on a live tile was so much better. The info streams were properly segregated and I had control over their prioritization through tile layout: important stuff at near the top, shown in a wide tile; stupid stuff near the bottom, in a small tile.
- gamma3 7y ago
  I've done the same - replace social media with Kindle. It's so good. And lock screen notifications are off for all apps. I only see a notification badge when I decide to pick up and unlock my phone.
StavrosK 7y ago
For a bit of context for the following, I've been working remote for years, five years in my previous company and one in the current one. The previous company did not use Slack. We used XMPP for one-on-one IMing (we did have chat rooms but nobody used them), physical desk phones for meetings or high-bandwidth chats, and email for everything else. The current company uses Slack and Zoom for meetings. There's a big difference between the two companies in socialization and how they feel, and I put it down to Slack. The old company mainly had one-on-one chats with anything involving more people being done through well-thought-out emails, whereas this one is pretty much exclusively chat rooms. This has the effect that you talk about work and only work, as you don't have that dead time after you're finished talking about the thing you need to say "what's new with you?". Instead of privately talking to your coworker and being able to be sincere, you're yelling your conversation all around the room so the interaction is pretty much going to be confined to work stuff. If you're starting now, I would wholeheartedly recommend getting your communications mostly one-on-one, and using something like Zulip for company communications, which has the feel of email but with a better UI. I also cannot recommend getting physical phones enough, they worked so much better than mobile phones or Zoom that they crossed the barrier of inconvenience, which meant we talked to each other much more often. It's not a huge hassle to get a Zoom going, but it is some hassle, and headphones/etc are enough to dissuade us from just picking up the phone and calling each other. Desk phones (connected to our PBX) were so seamless that you pressed a button and were connected to your coworker instantly, with amazing sound quality, a microphone that picked your voice up perfectly from anywhere in the room and a physical mute button. I should write an article about this, actually.
- frgotmylogin 7y ago
  I've found that a good way to lower the hassle on starting a zoom is to create a permanently open meeting with your phone number as the meeting ID. Then it is as simple as pasting/typing a link into an IM conversation and clicking it, and if you aren't at your own machine, it's easy to just type it. My only complaint with zoom is the lack of a prompt before launching video. I, and most of my coworkers, have uninstalled and taped over our webcams because of it.
  - 7y ago
sailfast 7y ago
"Deep Work" as outlined by Cal Newport was not collaborative at all. It was an individual deep dive on a specific topic, with deep thinking and a lot of time. Of course Slack is not where Deep Work happens, more than the telephone is where Deep Work happens. Now, is [Insert persistent group chat software] where meaningful work can happen as a team? Absolutely. Lots of things have gotten resolved, rubber ducked, fixed, etc in those channels especially for my remote teams. But nobody expects to get "Deep Work" done there.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
swozey 7y ago
Slack makes me miss Discord. Slack has taken a hard stance on how company culture should dictate it's use and doesn't give you the options to customize it away from their own viewpoint at all. I use Slack on a massive 40k person server (and probably 10 other servers) and it's absolutely terrible in this environment, as a non-admin you have no self support mechanisms (blocking DMs, muting users, etc). I really wish FOSS projects would stop using Slack, if the community grows to be large it's untenable and requires a ton of moderation time. I don't really want to go back to IRC but Slack isn't a good solution for them. There are so many options and features they could add that could be controlled by admins but they refuse to add them. (https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=en https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=e...) * You can sort channels and even put them into folders (Engineering, HR) * You can choose who to accept DMs from * You can block/mute users There's probably a ton of other things I'm not aware of. I rarely use Discord, but every time that I do I leave wishing companies I worked at used that instead.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  It's weird how Discord is better at being Slack than Slack is, in addition to everything else Discord does. I wonder if Discord could make a business-oriented fork without the integrated game store and so forth.
backpackway 7y ago
Guess I get downvoted to hell but I won't care and share my thoughts: Slack is for most employees a way to socialize, to get connected, to be not alone because employees are actual lonesome creatures looking for community, looking for something to belong to. Heck, companies are for employees the same. They want to to find friends, to get laid, to network because they can't outside of their free-lunch-corp. If they had to work in the basement in a shitty 3-people-firm, alone, they would have run away the first day. I haven't been employed for a long, long time, so my view on employees is quite negative and opinionated: employees except the sales ones are in terms of social interactions, networking, finding friends compared to non-employees way underdeveloped (to use a polite term). Don't confuse hanging around with peers in a company being social. Most wouldn't be able to find close peers outside of their company and comfort zone. Hence, they need Slack so urgently, so they can chat, plan boring get-togethers and like each others messages with crappy emojis.
- atoav 7y ago
  Interesting take on it. For me Slack always felt like something for people who, well, are kinda bored.. just like it was made to slack around – you get the idea. I always found emails more productive for exactly that reason – you don't get so many pointless jokes and people have to set priorities whom to write what thing. And if you really wanna have human interaction, just go there, make a 5 minute coffee break with them, have a little chat and be on your way. Or well, call, write them on the messenger of your choice, something like that.
vernie 7y ago
I love it when people use that terrible "backtrack" comic.
netwanderer3 7y ago
Slack only works for companies where the nature of their employees' work actually requires team communication that will benefit the organizations. Like everything in life, it's always a trade off. You may gain scores for team work but will sacrifice individual creativity. Deep creative tasks always require a full strength of focus and that state is only attainable once we allow our mind some time to completely "dial in". You simply cannot switch from 0 to 100 and be in the zone within the span of just a few minutes. When you are using Slack or any social media communication platforms, your brain must allocate cognitive resource to manage your ego because you do care about what other people think of your opinions. Since the pool of our cognitive resource is limited, we will have less remaining that can be dedicated to other real creative tasks. On top of that, you now have a distraction source where you constantly have to switch attention to. This may condition your brain over time and cause it to lose the ability to "dial in". Some companies were eager to force employees into using these tools while it didn't really provide any real tangible benefits, and may in fact even be destructive. Within a company only some departments should use it but some definitely shouldn't. It's the same reason why open office concept may work for certain organizations but not for all.
- gregmac 7y ago
  I think the Slack default of "Notify me on every new message" is the absolute worst thing. Change it to "Notify me on direct messages and mentions only". I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a reasonable default, but I've seen it with other chat applications too -- Hipchat was the same, IIRC. I don't monitor Slack (though everything I say here applies to any 'chat' app). It can interrupt me, but only when people @-mention me, and then at least there's a reason. Sometimes I even ignore those for a while until I'm able to shift focus, but that takes some discipline. If you don't have the discipline, close Slack (or set to DND) for a few hours while you work on something. What's the alternative to Slack -- Email? That's a million times worse, in every way. It's a necessary email when talking externally, but would ban it in a heartbeat for internal comms, if I had my way. In my view, every every email breaks down into three categories that are better served by another means of communication: * A task that needs to be completed == A ticket * Information to be shared to a group of people == Internal CMS posting (eg, wiki) * A discussion about something (which will usually lead to one of the above) == A conversation in Slack (asynchronous, equivalent to email) or a meeting (synchronous, if decision needs to be made quickly, and/or everyone is discussing in real-time anyway) The only thing e-mail is actually useful for is notifications from systems you don't monitor/use frequently and that can't notify via Slack, and communicating with people externally. Likely the people interrupted by Slack messages (assuming they don't use the brain-dead default of 'notify on all messages') are also currently interrupted by every e-mail or phone call that comes in, so I'm not really sure you can blame a lack of focus on Slack.
bitwize 7y ago
It is a truth universally acknowledged among managerial types, that given enough collaboration, all work becomes shallow. To that end, the business will increase the number of collaborative tools and the expectation of their use, because deep work presents a problem. It is a risk incurred by the business. Creative effort by an individual is not auditable, there's no paper trail. No actionable data -- data that would allow the business to verify each step of the process and estimate time and cost to completion -- is produced other than the creative output itself. The only person qualified to assess whether deep creative work by an individual is on track, on time, and under budget is the individual themself and they cannot be trusted! "Beware the guy in a room." So the deep parts of the work are now the responsibility of the team, and in order to do that, the team needs to stay in constant communication. Yes, it's slower and less efficient, but the business values reliability and accountability at the expense of some efficiency. This is why you don't get an office or even a desk -- you get about one linear meter of bench on which to set up your MacBook. This is why availability on Slack is paramount. This is why you're responsible for attending standup, planning, retro, grooming, Three Amigos, and whatever parking-lot meetings your PM has called throughout the week in addition to all the work you've committed to this sprint. This is why "sprints" in the first place. If you work for corporate, odds are you've signed up to join a hivemind, with all that entails.
- gamma3 7y ago
  I've worked at a company that did the sprints, planning, retro, Three Amigos etc. So glad we don't do any of that at my new company! And it turns out we ship stuff much faster.
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Fascinating article and discussion. I'm not sure I completely agree with the article's premise, but what's important here is the debate, rather than the article's premise or conclusions. This discussion would be broadened by the question: "With respect to the tools that a company mandates you use (and this includes software, like Slack) -- do those tools control you, or do you control them, and do they make you more productive or less productive, and in what scenarios?" Maybe that's a separate discussion however...
EGreg 7y ago
I will go further. None of the most popular top tools are promoting the best mode of whatever they are doing. And most of it has to do with realtime and notifications being abused in the interest of profit by centralized corporations that want to lock people into their platform and get them to "engage" with it. Slack for work - not the best for actually writing useful messages, more like <blah><return> <blah><return> and working people see ping ping ping, go back in and respond, and on it goes. Twitter for news - not the best for actually having productive discussions, more like <shout><announce><snipe><war> and most people see ping ping ping, and go back in and like/retweet to their 5 followers. Facebook for social - not the best for actually getting together (i.e. social life), more like <post cat video><post wedding photo><post political meme><post outrage> and lonely people sit at home and see ping ping ping, and go back in and respond, and on it goes. By now many of you know that I have spent the last 7 years working on a solution. The problem is that in order to build anything people will want to use, you need to spend at least half a million dollars on a realtime platform that can do stuff. If you want to see the problems and solutions, check out the videos on these pages: https://qbix.com https://qbix.com https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog (latest post)
village-idiot 7y ago
The tragedy of slack is that it was supposed to save us from email. The irony is that email itself was never the problem, as always it was people & culture.
dyeje 7y ago
I like Nuclino slot but I don't think it replaces Slack very well. At the end of the day you need a synchronous ping.
dredmorbius 7y ago
The only thing that's made large discussion platforms useful to me is ruthless blocking of noise. As one of my more popular G+ posts[1] said; "This One Trick Will Revolutionize Your Use of Social Media: Block fuckwits."[2] The problem with entepriise tools, both technical capabilities and organisational contexts, is that this is often neither supported nor acceptable. Everyone does not have to have full interrupt access to everyone else. https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.goog... ________________________________ Notes: 1. Thank you, Internet Archive. 2. Based on my Google Data Takeout, about 3,000 blocked profiles. I'll miss those.
gamma3 7y ago
I close Slack and focus on coding. I take short breaks from coding every 1-2 hours, and check Slack. Replying to someone 2 hours later has never been an issue. If it's urgent, people drop by my desk. Definitely don't have slack on my phone, and when Slack is closed, I don't get any kind of notifications. Being able to focus is important. In the end it matters I deliver on the project, not that I reply to every question immediately.
Funes- 7y ago
The mental and logistical acrobatics being proposed by users on this comment section only shows one thing about Slack (and any other app that is built on the optimization of an "engagement" metric): If you have to go that far to prevent something from easily taking all your attention and time, wouldn't you argue that it is, in fact, its design which is flawed, and not its users?
justaaron 7y ago
"captain obvious called"
- justaaron 7y ago
  the name gives you a clue...
  - justaaron 7y ago
    ... although i have to wonder about the sanity of companies willing to pay for viewing their own messages past 10k on a threaded messaging app, one level above to-dos-mvp and 2 above hello world... the css is nice, i guess....
m0zg 7y ago
Slack's design encourages water-cooler back and forth ad nauseam. One of my clients uses it, and because I now track nearly all my working time, I know exactly how much money they waste because I'm on slack. In fact they waste even more than I charge them, because there are usually at least 2 more people bullshitting on slack pretty much continuously. Something that would be solved in 5 minutes through email or chat turns into a 30-40 minute clusterfuck and nothing gets solved.
anotheryou 7y ago
How about permanent "Do not disturb"? People can still override it if they have to and you can catch up with all the static whenever it suits you.

381 points by zzaner 7y ago

This is a big reason behind why I created https://ourtimetothink.com https://ourtimetothink.com - a tool for teams on Slack to manage their DND status for scheduled blocks of time each day so they can get some deep work done

exachtly 7y ago

This article seems to be unaware that there are many jobs which exist solely for doing shallow work. I'd say for most "knowledge work" or "white collar" jobs shallow work is the point. A job that demands deep work consistently is pretty rare (see: Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber). In that respect, Slack is a perfect fit for most employees.

jayjaybinks 7y ago

This is exactly why we switched to Twist. Slack is fun but toxic. Working in an open office is bad enough but at least you can use noise canceling headphones. No such remedy for Slack.

zzaner 7y ago
Wish we could as well, but I don't see our management giving up Slack any time soon. "So connected! So collaborative!" Ugh.
throwaway2016a 7y ago
I think the equivalent is snoozing notifications. If it is important people can "notify anyway" -- however, your world culture needs to be OK with that.
alistairSH 7y ago
I’d rather close Slack, or snooze notifications, than wear headphones all day.
codingdave 7y ago
This is a cultural problem. You can close Slack. You can check it every couple hours and catch up. You can turn off notifications. If your management has problems with this, that is a problem with their culture, not the tool. We have channels where discussions will spread over multiple days because there simply is no expectation that Slack is real-time.
- te_chris 7y ago
  Nah, it's just a bad product that demands too much attention by design.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    What do you mean by "demands"? You can react to a notification or not. You can reduce the notifications. Slack itself doesn't force you to do anything.
- amichal 7y ago
  Indeed. There are 80+ channels in my workplace of 20 people. Most people are subscribed to just a few relevant to their current projects and there is zero expectation that a non direct message will be read by subscribers until they are next focused on the project. It serves a semi public record of what’s going on and a place for questions, notifications of important updates. It makes it easier for me to focus on work not harder since I can drop out for hours or days and trust that I can come back and be well informed.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    We have around 6k channels for our 1500 employees. I have around 60 I'm in that I need to pay some level of attention to or that I'll get Facebook defriend shamed for leaving. Conversations happen instantly and at odd hours and decisions are made and then scrolled past. Each team I work with has at least 3 channels, public, private, oncall/cr. Often an additional one per micro service. It's a mess.
upofadown 7y ago
Isn't Twist just threaded email?

rohtul 7y ago

“Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.” That. So true.

vishnu_ks 7y ago
Try Zulip. All meetings have an agenda! https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh Long Version: In Zulip, each and every conversation in a channel has a topic. So for catching up one don't have to go through all messages in a channel. Instead just go through the topic names and open the topics only you are interested in catching up. Since each conversation can have a topic you can reply back to conversations even after days as well as can have multiple productive conversations in one channel at same time! https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/ https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/
- thecatspaw 7y ago
  Or continue using slack, but correctly. We dont have offtopic in ours. We do have a #random chat, but its very infrequently used. Instead of zulips revolutionary tags, just use the slack threads. Zulip wont save you if you're drowning in Slack messages.
  - vishnu_ks 7y ago
    Zulip does save you from drowning in messages! Instead of going through all the messages, one just have to go through Topics and consume messages only from topics they are interested in. This is so much efficient compared to a chat system without topics :)
    - thecatspaw 7y ago
      Slack also has channels.
      - vishnu_ks 7y ago
        Topics are not the same as channels. In Zulip each conversation in a channel would have a topic. A channel would be a collection of topics. You can ignore the topics you are not interested in and focus on topics that are relevant. So for catching up all you need to do is go through the topics in a channel instead of going through all the messages. https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh

woliveirajr 7y ago

I went on to favorite this one and saw that my last time favorite was this:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419649 I think it tells me something about a persistent problem, curiosity or struggle.

rob74 7y ago

"you could try the monastic approach, ditching the city for a gig as a caretaker at an isolated hotel" - you can read "The Shining" to see how that may turn out...

Hoasi 7y ago

> Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens Sure, but that's not the point, it is not even where "work" happens. Slack can be useful as a communication tool. There is a time for work and a time for communication. Just as you don't answer the phone when you want to do serious work. Likewise, meetings are a waste of time, except when meeting face to face is useful. Communication is super important. After all, without communication, there is no work. Tools designed to enhance communication impede it when used as surrogate management. If Slack must be open at all times, it turns into a distraction.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
I keep slack open for 20 minutes a day max, mostly in breaks between real work. I don't feel like I miss much.

te_chris 7y ago

When I joined the startup I work at currently I had one key criteria: no Slack. We first tried Zulip, but the interface is a mess and everyone hated it. We've since switched to Twist and it is brilliant. The threaded model is genuinely useful for ongoing discussions, and then group chat for small messages. But the key effect is this: by being simple and utilitarian, people only use it for utility. No endless gif streams, no all day shit chat. It's great. Messaging is genuinely useful for a productive org, Slack doesn't event come close to providing this. As far as a better interface for IRC goes, it's good for that, the various industry groups I'm in are good, but for work? It's a tire fire.

king_magic 7y ago

Slack/Teams/etc. are the bane of my work existence. I will only open them when I absolutely need to. The distraction is too high and the utility is too low for it to be worth using.

w8rbt 7y ago

Reminds me of this Knuth quote, "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Source: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

shubhamjain 7y ago
To me, this can be taken as an argument against the post's premise. Could there be any e-communication tool more asynchronous than email? (Except for notifications, which you can turn off). I am not blaming Knuth, he must really dislike distraction of any sort. However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period, I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk to ask the question (vastly more distracting). We had meetings for tiny questions and they stretched far too long. The culture of company that is far more responsible than any single tool.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  There are a variety of communication methods: - Face to face - Phone call - Text message - Slack - Email - Publication/memo The rank corresponds to distraction, synchronicity, time to compose/respond, latency, and importance. Done well, Slack is a nice layer between a 10-minute email that might be forwarded on to some customer, and an "OK for demo Monday?" text message. You can include screenshots, links, spreadsheets, etc. The problem seems to come up when it's assumed to be lower-latency and higher-priority than it is. I can take a 30-minute break every couple hours and answer a couple emails and a half dozen Slack pings, or you can interrupt me with a phone call or text that I can ignore or take and subsequently answer a quick Slack query, or you can come to my desk and bring something to my attention right now. If you think Slack is like talking to me or calling to me (or treat it like it has that real-time priority) you're going to have a significant new distraction.
- Jedd 7y ago
  > However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period ... Perhaps I am (really) old, but pre slack is a blink of an eye ago. Also we are, sadly, not yet post-Slack. > ... I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk to ask the question (vastly more distracting). We had meetings for tiny questions and they stretched far too long. The culture of company that is far more responsible than any single tool. You're describing a work environment that bewildering appears to exclude email, or the option to explain to people how and when to use email.

rjdagost 7y ago

For myself, Slack is such a time waster that I'm at the point where I only check on it periodically. I tell coworkers that if there's an emergency that needs to be tended to right away, just text, call, or talk to me in person. If there's something that can wait, email is better. After 2+ years of using Slack on several different teams, I have yet to see any enhanced group communications. I do however see massive amounts of distractions and failed concentration. I'm sure "I'm doing it wrong", but this has been my experience with Slack.

fs2 7y ago
My experience exactly. The most common observation with Slack is how people praise it as the next big thing in productivity. But this is always during the honeymoon phase, after a few months of working with Slack it usually quickly wears off.
- rjdagost 7y ago
  I think the worst part of it (as the article mentions) is that it feels like you are doing something productive when you're using Slack, but the majority of time you're actually not. You're generating conversations, notifications, and in general producing tangible output that for me is subconsciously gratifying. That hooks me in to using the service even though consciously I know that I'm not getting real work done.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    The benefit I've found is in cross-team communication. Specifically of the "I need to reach out to this team I don't know about their product" variety. A) If they interact with Slack, I can search previous answers B) It promotes a culture of openness. Huge benefit in some orgs! We talk about our projects, warts and all, in public channels. If all your org channels are private, you're definitely Doing It Wrong C) It's far more scalable than ticketing. Issues can be resolved in three lines of text, rather than ticket creation, queue, assignment, closing, etc. As an above commenter noted though, you can and should push back on expectations of constant availability. Slack is asynchronous, not for initiating hi-pri issues.

geekamongus 7y ago

I have to minimize Slack throughout the day in order to get work done, and I try to only pay attention to it when I hear the alert noise when someone @'s me, which unfortunately I mis-hear all the time. My brain thinks it hears that alert noise beneath the music I have playing, or if I go to the other room it thinks it hears it from afar, so I run back to my desk to see if someone is messaging me. I hate that I have been conditioned this way, but I don't foresee it changing in my workplace any time soon. Some people I work with are on Slack all day chatting, and I really question if they are ever doing anything else.

jorisw 7y ago
Can't you disable the sound, so that you know that when you think you hear it, it's not meant for you?
justinclift 7y ago
Is it feasible for you to disable notifications?

protonimitate 7y ago

I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of manually digging through several different web UIs or using a bunch of different CLIs, I can just take a look at the corresponding channel. - Notifications _can be_ non-distracting. Being the correct channels, snoozing alerts, or just exiting slack when you need the deep focus headspace, is easy. I specifically don't want to be called/texted/interrupted in person unless it's something severely important. 90% of the time its not. I would much rather ignore a slack notification than answer a meaningless phonecall, or politely tell someone to bug off in person. I will say, the "always on" culture is hard to face when Slack/group messaging is a companies main point of communication. Luckily, I've only ever been in places where its been understood that you are only expected to be responsive during your work day. But, I think the negative effects of the cost of distraction by slack are overblown. There are endless ways to be distracted these days, and Slack is not the worst thing out there. You can always just exit the program.

smoe 7y ago
Agreed. Its not just about the tool but how you use it. For us it actually helps to get less distracted. There are very few things that require a sub 3 hour reaction. So we just put a question in Slack even if it's for the person sitting right next to you. Eventually the person will answer when they have some time. Much better than constantly having someone tipping one your shoulder or calling you Just because you have instant messages doesn't mean you have to respond instantly. Disable notifications and checking every few hours is plenty enough. If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently.
- MisterOctober 7y ago
  Yep, this is exactly how I use it at my office. Slack isn't where 'deep work' happens, it's one of the things that allows me to accomplish 'deep work' by reducing interruption and distraction.

aloukissas 7y ago

Coincidentally, I was just listening a podcast episode with the creator of Level (https://level.app/ https://level.app/), which was built to fix exactly all these issues mentioned in the article. I agree 100% with this - the culture of ASAP and the FOMO that's created if you're not always on Slack, prevents one from doing deep, meaningful work. I'm really looking forward to trying out Level.

ptasker 7y ago
We're currently using Level now and it's definitely different from Slack. I think the biggest issue we have with it at this point is that it's still in active development. It's also missing a lot of things that you take for granted with Slack. Things like auto-link expansion and third-party integrations of any kind.

swagatkonchada 7y ago

how about no notifications for messages unless the sender specifically says "send notification"?

pgm8705 7y ago

I'm wondering if team size is what makes slack such a pain for many posters. Slack is great for my 8 person remote company. I keep notifications off for channels that aren't directly related to my development responsibilities, but I value having access to them for review at the end of the day so I'm aware of what is happening elsewhere. If I need a long stretch of uninterrupted development time, I turn on Do Not Disturb and everyone knows not to override this unless there is an emergency.

guaka 7y ago

Neither is Hacker News.

grogenaut 7y ago
I'm not required to use HN by my job. I am required to be available on slack.

athenot 7y ago

Disclaimer: I work for Webex Teams, another collab tool. I think a lot of this depends a lot more on the expectations of the whole group. This needs to be defined at an org level and well understood by everyone. It's not so much the tool as how it's used. There is now a continuum of interactions: - FYIs that are put out in a topical chat. You get to those when you have a moment, when you go through your unread rooms to catch up. Same for topics that you are only peripherally following. Time is not of the essence there. Zero interruption here and no expectation for you to be always listening. - Topical chats where you are @-mentionned. This is where a conversation that you're not actively following suddenly took a turn where your input is sollicited. But since you see the topic of the room, you are in control about whether it's worth an interruption. The group's expectation is that the person that was mentionned will join the conversation IF they are not in the middle of something (assuming the topic is not alarmist). - New rooms that got created around a topic or you getting added to an existing room. Basically it's similar to the above, where you're getting dragged into a conversation. - 1:1 chats with specific requests. Again, it depends who it's from, you triage based on origin. But the expectation is already managed at our group level. In all these modes, you can chose to accept the interruption or defer it. The deeper your work, the more likely you can defer it. We can operate like this because we have the nuclear option we can always use when it's actually needed: PagerDuty. This brings a few benefits: the person paging a team or another individual is aware that they are putting a burden of urgency and there's a recorded audit log of that page. So it's not used lightly. Once you've accepted the interruption though, you still get to control its modality. - Very often, a "hey, quick question" can turn into something WAY larger than the requester could imagine. That's when we point them to creating a Jira ticket, effectively punting a synchronous interruption into an asynchronous unit of work. Or you can tell the requester to schedule a meeting to work more deeply on that. (Related topic: ALWAYS have at least one day where it is forbidden to schedule meetings, accros the whole org.) - If the request is about an urgent matter, we just do an instant video meeting within Webex Teams. That converts long drawn out chats into quick visual meetings where the nuances are better expressed. Because in a long chat, the mind is already interrupted, so having to wait for typing and confirming nuance ends up taking a lot of time.

atoav 7y ago

I like email more than Slack for asynchrounous communication, Signal more than Slack for one-on-one or small group and IRC better than Slack for bigger groups or topic based conversations. I tried to like it. I am a young person for whom IRC and Email seem very oldfashioned. But hey, it works and doesn't get me distracted.

skc 7y ago

The only time I ever see positive views on Slack here is when Microsoft Teams is brought up :D

Kiro 7y ago
It's because HN is a stereotypical echo chamber where the correct opinion right now that fits the stereotype is to hate Slack.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  That added nothing to the conversation. HN may have a uniformity of opinion, because a large fraction of effective people in Software don't like something. That would be worth talking about. Ad Hominem attacks are pointless.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    While his/her comment may have been narrowly directed and could even be bordering trolling/flame-baiting, it made me think about how the structure of discussion groups in general could encourage echo chambers. His/her comment is a case-in-point as it's being downvoted. I tend to believe discussion groups with comment voting systems (e.g., Reddit, Digg years ago) tend to further or more quickly close communication feedback loops that help lead to echo chambers: "what we like, what don't we like." People who want to actively engage will be more quickly discouraged if their perspectives differ and are quickly shunned, even if they're potentially valid. Those who remain will be conditioned with positive reinforcement when they repeat the status quo ("rewarded" with up-votes from peers). Comment voting systems tend to suppress perspectives that challenge the status quo in general (they can also promote challenges, though anecdotally, I observe this far less). Even without voting systems though, peer pressure in discussions shapes the discussions in a feedback loop that, in my opinion, leads to echo chambers of perspectives. Obviously the tradeoff is: what's the alternative? True garbage is posted that should be removed (spam, direct personal attacks, etc.). Moderator and editor systems shape discussions to their bias vs. a more distributed voting approach biases towards the status quo. Another option is to allow any perspective a perpetual voice (false negative spam and uncivil discussion emerges) which requires filtering/ignoring on a per participant/client basis (not good at promoting return visitors who want quality discussions), but this does allow exposure to new and differing perspectives. I'm not sure what the best solution is. As you pointed out, and I agree entirely with you, his/her comment certainly could have been presented better and didn't need to attack HN directly. At the very least, for me, it illustrates frustration as a symptom of a potentially systematic problem. Sometimes, I do wonder if "trolling" and "flamebaiting" often regarded as negative behaviors, are in reality healthy for discussion groups. They encourage a never ending revaluation (QA/QC, CD even) of ideologies adopted by the status quo and foster a competitive behavior of ideas using emotion for drive and momentum. I've read some of the best in-depth and even enlightening discussions spun out from such comments, once you get past initially emotionally fueled personal attacks. To be fair, I've also observed some of the most worthless volleyball of personal attacks. I suggest those disagreements and the emotional fuel help us push away complacency and strive for improvement instead of avoiding challenges. Without any emotion, few have desire to bpther exploring some ideas. Emotion isn't required to have a progressive discussion, but it seems to me to help light fires and engage more ideas, especially if done tastefully.

jackpeterfletch 7y ago

When I read these kind of pieces I wonder if people know that just because your company has Slack, that doesn't mean they expect you to read everything in it. Company wide/support channels, your basically at liberty to completely ignore these. Some people crack the odd joke in here, camaraderie in a team is nice, but don't feel its compulsory. I mute them, though they're are great places to be able to search! The channel for your immediate team/specific projects, your not obliged to monitor this but it'd probably be helpful for the team if you checked in twice a day or so, you might be able to guide or unblock a teammate with knowledge they don't know you have. And direct messages. Again, its up to your to triage these, if its unimportant just mark unread and come back later. The important point of slack is that communication is open, which brings network effects, I cant count the number of times I've stumbled on information that's been directly helpful to me. However, just like any other open information portal, most of it isn't directed at you, so don't worry about it.

matchbok 7y ago
But, the whole "checking in on a channel" thing is exactly the problem. It creates a nonsense or a "missing out" feeling for the team. It is too synchronous.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jackpeterfletch 7y ago
  So, I think the crux here, is that the below, in my opinion, is a purely perceived pressure. You shoulden't feel pressured to read everything in Slack. > Reduced pressure to read everything. Let’s face it, it’s not practical or necessary to keep up with every conversation. The aggregated timeline in Level lets you subscribe to channels and sip from the firehose of conversations without pressuring you to “catch up” on all unreads.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    The fear of missing something is real. I have seen decisions taken in Slack by two or three of the four or five people who should have been involved. I'm not saying this is caused by Slack -- the problem is absolutely with the people who thought it was okay to act on such a decision. But I do think it's facilitated; the people involved seem to subconsciously think that because they're discussing in a public channel where the other people are "present" -- even though they're not active -- that everyone's informed. Whereas if they'd just had a hallway face-to-face, someone would have said, "Hey, we really need to check with Laura and Ed about this too".

zitterbewegung 7y ago

Slack is not a good product fit for every company . To be honest I think it can work for organizations under 20 people because startups were targeted first . If you want something that can scale then use discord or email/IM etc..

commandlinefan 7y ago

Deep work? We live in a world of open offices, daily standups, max-four-hour JIRA tickets and pair/mob programming. The people in charge don't believe that "deep work" even means anything.

mateo411 7y ago
This is true, but most if not all of these tasks don't require Deep Work. Cal Newport is an academic. It takes a lot of thought and a distraction free environment to write papers about CS Theory. Most people in these environments usually know how to write software. Most of the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep Work. The design of these systems requires more thought, but the implementation should be fairly straightforward once you have a plan.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > Most of the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep Work There's a self-fulfilling prophecy for you. We assume a priori that developing software doesn't require much thought, so we'll skimp on environmental factors that contribute to actual thought and see what programming we can get out of it. And lo and behold, if you ignore the usability problems, security problems, out-of-control memory problems and the necessity of an army of testers to make up for the fact that nobody actually understands the code, the resulting software kind-of sort-of meets the requirements so we were right, software CAN be reliably produced with zero concentration in an all-interruptions, all-the-time environment!
ebiester 7y ago
You really can get deep work done in pair and mob programming, especially when trained in it. Consider https://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programming-guy-steele-and.html https://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programm... as an example of how it can look. Mind you, I don't recommend 10 hour sessions ever, much less to begin. I find it odd to believe that intense, deep work can only happen in solo.
justaaron 7y ago

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago

this new wave of chat clients is shit activity does not equal productivity

otabdeveloper1 7y ago

> Chatting online doesn't contribute to productive work. Wow, who knew, stop the presses and give this man a nobel!

nottorp 7y ago

I don't understand. Why do you allow Slack to interrupt you? Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it overflows. Easy as ABC. I run like 6 different messaging platforms, but none is allowed to interrupt me. If you can't restrain yourself from checking messages constantly, you have a problem not the medium.

alxlaz 7y ago
> Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it overflows. ...then keep a straight face while your super Agile manager berates you in front of the entire team because you're hard to communicate with, we have Slack for a reason. Not everyone has the choice to not allow Slack to interrupt you. Some organizations mandate this sort of communication, disruptive though it may be. Edit: just to clarify, I'm not in this situation :-D. But I've seen it happening.
- ihuman 7y ago
  Then turn on notifications for when you are @mentioned, or specific important channels. If someone really wants to get your attention, they can. The noise is filtered out and doesn't reach you unless you reach for it.
- cc81 7y ago
  If your nature of work is such that you need to be available then I get that your manager would berate you. It might not be what someone likes to do but for some it is better to be available to the team than to isolate themselves and work.
- rbonvall 7y ago
  I understand the expectation of having the application open on your workstation while you're at the office, but having notifications enables on your personal phone is not sane.
patwolf 7y ago
I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. I say legitimate because it's not just missing out on inconsequential chatter. Slack is a business tool and business decisions get make over slack. The folks that read every messages and respond quickly are therefore the ones that get to contribute the most to decisions. When waiting too long to respond, the conversation has already changed and it's too late to contribute. And Slack's threads don't solve that problem IMHO.

PaulHoule 7y ago

I worked at a startup where we were always having a hard time finding documents and conversations. Almost every other week we would try or consider adding another place to store documents as a solution for this problem. I saw from the beginning that this made no sense at all, that adding a new sharing service could only make the problem worse but I could only slow this trend down. A real solution would involve an intelligent aggregator that sucks it down from those sources and imposes some structure on it together with you. For instance the python docs have everything you need to know about Python, Google and stack overflow are wrong at least half the time. So I build trails over the documents that get me to reference materials i need in 1 or 2 clicks. Control of document sharing is also a big thing in Biz. The star salesperson was trained as a lawyer. Ask him how to share a document and he will tell you to do it the same way my accountant does it. He doesn't mind it when I show him something in Github because he knows familiarity with Github gets him far in credibility with everybody. Elsewhere in the business people use Google Docs and also collaborate with the hugest businesses on Earth. People at those businesses might not believe Google Docs is secure and it is not good for the relationship when somebody shares a Google Doc in Google.

atoav 7y ago
I always had the feeling there are two ways to solve this: either you go full centralized and have ONE hub were everything important is stored and archived, or you store it right with the work (e.g. github issues, per project wiki, or in a folder directly in the project). What doesn't work is a in-between-solution where you have >5 places each with its own outdated fragments of nothingness. This means whenever you decide on something you just will have to bite the bullet and use a meaningful amount of time to get everything into the new system. When the new system works, it people are more likely to honor it than contributing into something they feel is broken and somehow meaningless.

robbiep 7y ago

We have a remote team and have recently implemented a rule/trial of no slack after 10am until 4pm - so everyone can organise, everyone has enough work to do during their 6 hrs to continue if the need to ask a question then have the afternoon to answer questions/move forward on any blockers from their ‘time out’ Early days but seems to be improving ‘distractability’

delinka 7y ago
Now to contend with "well, can't get an answer so I'm blocked until 4pm!" In the corporate environment I'm in, this is a fabulous excuse used by many teams from around the world. Works for email as well.
- icholy 7y ago
  Then work on something else.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  If hard blockages are legitimately happening on a regular basis, being able to ping other people is not a solution to the actual organizational problem, it's just a band-aid.
- robbiep 7y ago
  Well we’re a small team so that’s easier, and like I said it’s a trial. So we shall see!

icedchai 7y ago

Slack is fine if you turn off essentially all notifications. The same is true of email. Any sort of notification / alert is disruptive to deep (real) work. If it's urgent, send me a text. Or, god forbid, a phone call.

rc_kas 7y ago
I leave notifications on. But for christ sakes -- logout of the Slack app when you want to focus. I logout for long periods and then open it back up when I want to see what the rest of the team has going on.

matchbok 7y ago

Experiment for slack lovers: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Have another use try to start another conversation in the same channel. This is a common occurrence. The other users either have to spam the channel or wait until your topic is complete, which could never be! What happens? Garbage. Chat is not how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.

smolder 7y ago
There are a few ways of dealing with this that I've seen. On IRC, when a direct back-and-forth starts, etiquette is to name the other party specifically at the start of each line. Every client I've used will highlight those lines where your name is mentioned, making it easier to pick out your thread of conversation. The text is typically packed in pretty tight as well, which makes this more feasible in busy channels since you're not likely to have to scroll. Some clients also have a separate UI section for messages that target you, making it even easier to follow. In Slack, the chat contents are shown in a less dense way (more whitespace & separation, big user icons,) but they found a solution that seems to work pretty well, which is the 'thread' feature. (This is pretty recent AFAIK.) Threads stay collapsed for people who aren't participating and pop out for people who want to. While they are pretty much inevitable, multiple orthogonal conversations happening in a channel might also sometimes be a call for reorganization or sidebar channels/group chats. As an aside, one of my favorite experiences relating to chat is having multiple concurrent conversations with the same person or people, on different topics, in their respective channels. It highlights how bizarre the rapid context-switching pattern you fall into with chat applications is.

mindcrime 7y ago

I'm not a fan of Slack in particular just because it's a closed-source, proprietary, walled-garden. But that aside, while it is true that "Chat / IM apps are not where 'deep work' happens", that doesn't mean that chat / IM isn't valuable. You just have to recognize it for what it is, and figure out how to tap into the value that it represents. If that means turning it all off at certain times to support "deep work" then so be it. The question, in my mind, is how to find the optimal balance between synchronous, interrupt-driven communication and asynchronous communication. I'm not sure anybody has figured out the perfect answer for that yet.

beat 7y ago
The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times?
- mindcrime 7y ago
  The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times? Hand them a copy of Deep Work? Also, don't just turn it off... announce to the group "Hey guys, I'm going offline to do deep work for the next 3 hours. Only interrupt me if the building is on fire, OK?" or something like that. Set a status or "away message" that says "offline for focused deep work right now. Interrupt only for absolute emergencies." or something similar.
  - beat 7y ago
    Sure, technically it can be done. Socially, though... we have a hard time saying no to people. That's a lot to overcome. We have tools for interruption and social inhibitions against not using them.
    - mindcrime 7y ago
      Agreed. That's why I find it easier if you announce ahead of time, "hey guys, I'm going offline for a while to focus on $SOME_SPECIFIC_THING". At least with the places I've worked, and the cultures I've worked in, I've found that people (usually) respect that.

beat 7y ago

It's not just Slack. It's our phones! Notifications are distraction engines. At the beginning of March, I went cold turkey on most social media (I still allow myself HN and a guitar player's forum), and completely cold turkey on using my phone for these things - I have to use an actual computer. I put Kindle where Facebook used to be on my phone, and always have a book on it that can be read in small bites for those "OMG I AM BORED FOR TWO MINUTES" moments, and I carry a Kindle Paperwhite with longer-form reading for lunchtime and such. My brain feels amazingly different. I'm more aware and happier. I'm getting more work done. My stress levels are way down. My book-reading rate has at least tripled. This article refers a lot to Cal Newport's excellent Deep Work, but I wish it also referred to his more recent Digital Minimalism, which is full of useful advice for limiting the ways social media and instant messaging undermine our productivity and happiness.

chungleong 7y ago
The thing that I really miss about old Windows Phone is the lack of notifications. They're almost never that time critical. Having the same info on a live tile was so much better. The info streams were properly segregated and I had control over their prioritization through tile layout: important stuff at near the top, shown in a wide tile; stupid stuff near the bottom, in a small tile.
gamma3 7y ago
I've done the same - replace social media with Kindle. It's so good. And lock screen notifications are off for all apps. I only see a notification badge when I decide to pick up and unlock my phone.

StavrosK 7y ago

For a bit of context for the following, I've been working remote for years, five years in my previous company and one in the current one. The previous company did not use Slack. We used XMPP for one-on-one IMing (we did have chat rooms but nobody used them), physical desk phones for meetings or high-bandwidth chats, and email for everything else. The current company uses Slack and Zoom for meetings. There's a big difference between the two companies in socialization and how they feel, and I put it down to Slack. The old company mainly had one-on-one chats with anything involving more people being done through well-thought-out emails, whereas this one is pretty much exclusively chat rooms. This has the effect that you talk about work and only work, as you don't have that dead time after you're finished talking about the thing you need to say "what's new with you?". Instead of privately talking to your coworker and being able to be sincere, you're yelling your conversation all around the room so the interaction is pretty much going to be confined to work stuff. If you're starting now, I would wholeheartedly recommend getting your communications mostly one-on-one, and using something like Zulip for company communications, which has the feel of email but with a better UI. I also cannot recommend getting physical phones enough, they worked so much better than mobile phones or Zoom that they crossed the barrier of inconvenience, which meant we talked to each other much more often. It's not a huge hassle to get a Zoom going, but it is some hassle, and headphones/etc are enough to dissuade us from just picking up the phone and calling each other. Desk phones (connected to our PBX) were so seamless that you pressed a button and were connected to your coworker instantly, with amazing sound quality, a microphone that picked your voice up perfectly from anywhere in the room and a physical mute button. I should write an article about this, actually.

frgotmylogin 7y ago
I've found that a good way to lower the hassle on starting a zoom is to create a permanently open meeting with your phone number as the meeting ID. Then it is as simple as pasting/typing a link into an IM conversation and clicking it, and if you aren't at your own machine, it's easy to just type it. My only complaint with zoom is the lack of a prompt before launching video. I, and most of my coworkers, have uninstalled and taped over our webcams because of it.
- 7y ago

sailfast 7y ago

"Deep Work" as outlined by Cal Newport was not collaborative at all. It was an individual deep dive on a specific topic, with deep thinking and a lot of time. Of course Slack is not where Deep Work happens, more than the telephone is where Deep Work happens. Now, is [Insert persistent group chat software] where meaningful work can happen as a team? Absolutely. Lots of things have gotten resolved, rubber ducked, fixed, etc in those channels especially for my remote teams. But nobody expects to get "Deep Work" done there.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

swozey 7y ago

Slack makes me miss Discord. Slack has taken a hard stance on how company culture should dictate it's use and doesn't give you the options to customize it away from their own viewpoint at all. I use Slack on a massive 40k person server (and probably 10 other servers) and it's absolutely terrible in this environment, as a non-admin you have no self support mechanisms (blocking DMs, muting users, etc). I really wish FOSS projects would stop using Slack, if the community grows to be large it's untenable and requires a ton of moderation time. I don't really want to go back to IRC but Slack isn't a good solution for them. There are so many options and features they could add that could be controlled by admins but they refuse to add them. (https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=en https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=e...) * You can sort channels and even put them into folders (Engineering, HR) * You can choose who to accept DMs from * You can block/mute users There's probably a ton of other things I'm not aware of. I rarely use Discord, but every time that I do I leave wishing companies I worked at used that instead.

PhasmaFelis 7y ago
It's weird how Discord is better at being Slack than Slack is, in addition to everything else Discord does. I wonder if Discord could make a business-oriented fork without the integrated game store and so forth.

backpackway 7y ago

Guess I get downvoted to hell but I won't care and share my thoughts: Slack is for most employees a way to socialize, to get connected, to be not alone because employees are actual lonesome creatures looking for community, looking for something to belong to. Heck, companies are for employees the same. They want to to find friends, to get laid, to network because they can't outside of their free-lunch-corp. If they had to work in the basement in a shitty 3-people-firm, alone, they would have run away the first day. I haven't been employed for a long, long time, so my view on employees is quite negative and opinionated: employees except the sales ones are in terms of social interactions, networking, finding friends compared to non-employees way underdeveloped (to use a polite term). Don't confuse hanging around with peers in a company being social. Most wouldn't be able to find close peers outside of their company and comfort zone. Hence, they need Slack so urgently, so they can chat, plan boring get-togethers and like each others messages with crappy emojis.

atoav 7y ago
Interesting take on it. For me Slack always felt like something for people who, well, are kinda bored.. just like it was made to slack around – you get the idea. I always found emails more productive for exactly that reason – you don't get so many pointless jokes and people have to set priorities whom to write what thing. And if you really wanna have human interaction, just go there, make a 5 minute coffee break with them, have a little chat and be on your way. Or well, call, write them on the messenger of your choice, something like that.

vernie 7y ago

I love it when people use that terrible "backtrack" comic.

netwanderer3 7y ago

Slack only works for companies where the nature of their employees' work actually requires team communication that will benefit the organizations. Like everything in life, it's always a trade off. You may gain scores for team work but will sacrifice individual creativity. Deep creative tasks always require a full strength of focus and that state is only attainable once we allow our mind some time to completely "dial in". You simply cannot switch from 0 to 100 and be in the zone within the span of just a few minutes. When you are using Slack or any social media communication platforms, your brain must allocate cognitive resource to manage your ego because you do care about what other people think of your opinions. Since the pool of our cognitive resource is limited, we will have less remaining that can be dedicated to other real creative tasks. On top of that, you now have a distraction source where you constantly have to switch attention to. This may condition your brain over time and cause it to lose the ability to "dial in". Some companies were eager to force employees into using these tools while it didn't really provide any real tangible benefits, and may in fact even be destructive. Within a company only some departments should use it but some definitely shouldn't. It's the same reason why open office concept may work for certain organizations but not for all.

gregmac 7y ago
I think the Slack default of "Notify me on every new message" is the absolute worst thing. Change it to "Notify me on direct messages and mentions only". I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a reasonable default, but I've seen it with other chat applications too -- Hipchat was the same, IIRC. I don't monitor Slack (though everything I say here applies to any 'chat' app). It can interrupt me, but only when people @-mention me, and then at least there's a reason. Sometimes I even ignore those for a while until I'm able to shift focus, but that takes some discipline. If you don't have the discipline, close Slack (or set to DND) for a few hours while you work on something. What's the alternative to Slack -- Email? That's a million times worse, in every way. It's a necessary email when talking externally, but would ban it in a heartbeat for internal comms, if I had my way. In my view, every every email breaks down into three categories that are better served by another means of communication: * A task that needs to be completed == A ticket * Information to be shared to a group of people == Internal CMS posting (eg, wiki) * A discussion about something (which will usually lead to one of the above) == A conversation in Slack (asynchronous, equivalent to email) or a meeting (synchronous, if decision needs to be made quickly, and/or everyone is discussing in real-time anyway) The only thing e-mail is actually useful for is notifications from systems you don't monitor/use frequently and that can't notify via Slack, and communicating with people externally. Likely the people interrupted by Slack messages (assuming they don't use the brain-dead default of 'notify on all messages') are also currently interrupted by every e-mail or phone call that comes in, so I'm not really sure you can blame a lack of focus on Slack.

bitwize 7y ago

It is a truth universally acknowledged among managerial types, that given enough collaboration, all work becomes shallow. To that end, the business will increase the number of collaborative tools and the expectation of their use, because deep work presents a problem. It is a risk incurred by the business. Creative effort by an individual is not auditable, there's no paper trail. No actionable data -- data that would allow the business to verify each step of the process and estimate time and cost to completion -- is produced other than the creative output itself. The only person qualified to assess whether deep creative work by an individual is on track, on time, and under budget is the individual themself and they cannot be trusted! "Beware the guy in a room." So the deep parts of the work are now the responsibility of the team, and in order to do that, the team needs to stay in constant communication. Yes, it's slower and less efficient, but the business values reliability and accountability at the expense of some efficiency. This is why you don't get an office or even a desk -- you get about one linear meter of bench on which to set up your MacBook. This is why availability on Slack is paramount. This is why you're responsible for attending standup, planning, retro, grooming, Three Amigos, and whatever parking-lot meetings your PM has called throughout the week in addition to all the work you've committed to this sprint. This is why "sprints" in the first place. If you work for corporate, odds are you've signed up to join a hivemind, with all that entails.

gamma3 7y ago
I've worked at a company that did the sprints, planning, retro, Three Amigos etc. So glad we don't do any of that at my new company! And it turns out we ship stuff much faster.

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

Fascinating article and discussion. I'm not sure I completely agree with the article's premise, but what's important here is the debate, rather than the article's premise or conclusions. This discussion would be broadened by the question: "With respect to the tools that a company mandates you use (and this includes software, like Slack) -- do those tools control you, or do you control them, and do they make you more productive or less productive, and in what scenarios?" Maybe that's a separate discussion however...

EGreg 7y ago

I will go further. None of the most popular top tools are promoting the best mode of whatever they are doing. And most of it has to do with realtime and notifications being abused in the interest of profit by centralized corporations that want to lock people into their platform and get them to "engage" with it. Slack for work - not the best for actually writing useful messages, more like <blah><return> <blah><return> and working people see ping ping ping, go back in and respond, and on it goes. Twitter for news - not the best for actually having productive discussions, more like <shout><announce><snipe><war> and most people see ping ping ping, and go back in and like/retweet to their 5 followers. Facebook for social - not the best for actually getting together (i.e. social life), more like <post cat video><post wedding photo><post political meme><post outrage> and lonely people sit at home and see ping ping ping, and go back in and respond, and on it goes. By now many of you know that I have spent the last 7 years working on a solution. The problem is that in order to build anything people will want to use, you need to spend at least half a million dollars on a realtime platform that can do stuff. If you want to see the problems and solutions, check out the videos on these pages: https://qbix.com https://qbix.com https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog (latest post)

village-idiot 7y ago

The tragedy of slack is that it was supposed to save us from email. The irony is that email itself was never the problem, as always it was people & culture.

dyeje 7y ago

I like Nuclino slot but I don't think it replaces Slack very well. At the end of the day you need a synchronous ping.

dredmorbius 7y ago

The only thing that's made large discussion platforms useful to me is ruthless blocking of noise. As one of my more popular G+ posts[1] said; "This One Trick Will Revolutionize Your Use of Social Media: Block fuckwits."[2] The problem with entepriise tools, both technical capabilities and organisational contexts, is that this is often neither supported nor acceptable. Everyone does not have to have full interrupt access to everyone else. https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.goog... ________________________________ Notes: 1. Thank you, Internet Archive. 2. Based on my Google Data Takeout, about 3,000 blocked profiles. I'll miss those.

gamma3 7y ago

I close Slack and focus on coding. I take short breaks from coding every 1-2 hours, and check Slack. Replying to someone 2 hours later has never been an issue. If it's urgent, people drop by my desk. Definitely don't have slack on my phone, and when Slack is closed, I don't get any kind of notifications. Being able to focus is important. In the end it matters I deliver on the project, not that I reply to every question immediately.

Funes- 7y ago

The mental and logistical acrobatics being proposed by users on this comment section only shows one thing about Slack (and any other app that is built on the optimization of an "engagement" metric): If you have to go that far to prevent something from easily taking all your attention and time, wouldn't you argue that it is, in fact, its design which is flawed, and not its users?

justaaron 7y ago

"captain obvious called"

justaaron 7y ago
the name gives you a clue...
- justaaron 7y ago
  ... although i have to wonder about the sanity of companies willing to pay for viewing their own messages past 10k on a threaded messaging app, one level above to-dos-mvp and 2 above hello world... the css is nice, i guess....

m0zg 7y ago

Slack's design encourages water-cooler back and forth ad nauseam. One of my clients uses it, and because I now track nearly all my working time, I know exactly how much money they waste because I'm on slack. In fact they waste even more than I charge them, because there are usually at least 2 more people bullshitting on slack pretty much continuously. Something that would be solved in 5 minutes through email or chat turns into a 30-40 minute clusterfuck and nothing gets solved.

anotheryou 7y ago

How about permanent "Do not disturb"? People can still override it if they have to and you can catch up with all the static whenever it suits you.