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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

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 8y 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 8y 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.
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  Exactly. Take pride in being that person who is so busy/focused that you can't be bothered to respond instantly to every discussion. Slowly train others to understand this working style.
- EForEndeavour 8y ago
  > If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently. This is an overly harsh assumption. There are plenty of compelling real-world examples of organized, effective people being blocked by some small but urgent thing that's not their fault and requires a few minutes of attention from someone else. If a dev just started on my project but the DB credentials I gave him aren't working (or whatever), that's on me. If my boss's boss jogs over to our office area asking who here knows Thing_X the best, I'm going to deign to remove my noise-cancelling headphones and accept the deep-work disruption.
  - smoe 8y ago
    True, I'm a bit harsh on this, but I also used the word usually instead of always on purpose. Yes, sometimes someone can really get blocked and not able to work, no problem to ask for help in this case. On the other hand I have seen it enough times that people (especially juniors and bosses) continuously ask question without having bothered to think about it prior. Forcing them to deal with a problem by themselves for a bit and not distract others has resolved many of them. The key thing is being clear what communication and team culture you want to establish. I'm not just a grumpy guy that ignores messages or avoid helping others. It is something that has been discussed and agreed upon in the company and is expected to be respected by anyone no matter where the person is in the hierarchy.
    - EForEndeavour 8y ago
      Fair enough: I agree that plenty of people prematurely ask someone rather than try to figure out a solution by searching, thinking, experimenting, etc., and using Slack as an asynchronous channel will generally encourage people to hack a bit more at their problem before instinctively distracting the person next to them.
raverbashing 8y ago
> 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. This a million times Bonus points, you don't annoy other people in the office with your impromptu meeting next to someone that has nothing to do with it
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
I use Sococo for this. It has an expanded interface to increase awareness of group activity - who's talking with whom, has the meeting started, is anybody still in the office.
glvn 8y ago
I would add to this, Slack can be a fantastic tool or it can be the bane of your workday, it all comes down to how your company/team use Slack. On my team almost everything goes into the main team chat; however, every message is tagged with the person it's aimed at and any team-wide communication is tagged @here. Any sub-conversation about that top-level message happens in the message thread. With this method, you are only notified if you are tagged in a message or if a message is tagged @here. Outside of that I will check slack about once per hour and can see all top-level issues at a glance that either my team or a specific person has been notified of. If I am interested in whatever the issue is I can dive into the thread and get more information about the issue or contribute my 0.02. I see many here suggesting other software, at the end of the day that's all it is, software. The productivity drain/boost comes down to how everyone decides to use that software. If you get 100 emails a day with the subject "IMPORTANT: READ IMMEDIATELY", email suddenly becomes just as annoying and as much of a time-suck as Slack, this applies to all communication methods.
- deepakhj 8y ago
  I mute at here in all channels. It should be banned.
  - shaggyfrog 8y ago
    It's easily the most misused feature of Slack. Using @here in a channel is the equivalent of standing on your desk and shouting at everyone around you. So what happens is, like you, everyone starts muting it. And then you just have people shouting into the void.
    - projectdelphai 8y ago
      I think you should rules about it at the workplace. At mine, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've seen an @here. And one of them, the person was told he shouldn't have done it since it wasn't important. Really makes everything think before they use it.
      - 8y ago
e40 8y ago
Slack can be a terrible tool if you let it, but it can be wonderful, too, if you tune your notifications, and use DnD when you need it. Also, schedule DnD for non-work hours so you are never bothered outside of work hours, unless there is a true emergency (and if you work at a place with a lot of emergencies, then you have a shitty workplace). It's a tool. Use the tool, don't let the tool use you.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Slack is hostile to users and panders to management. It's a sound business strategy. I can't trust the platform, I'll always be second class. What about scheduled DnD for days off? Ability to /ignore annoying bots? Two basic features which should've been added long ago.
  - lostdog 8y ago
    Those features plus the ability to ignore @here from only certain users would make a huge difference.
  - e40 8y ago
    Slack is hostile to users and panders to management. It's a sound business strategy. I can't trust the platform, I'll always be second class. That is very vague. Sounds like you have an axe to grind with your management. What about scheduled DnD for days off? Ability to /ignore annoying bots? Two basic features which should've been added long ago. Good feature idea. Have you submitted them? As for as DnD scheduling for PTO, they have custom which I use on my last day. Works perfectly for me. As for /ignore for bots, sounds like the people controlling your Slack need a suggestion or two.
    - xfitm3 8y ago
      DnD scheduling for Sat/Sun.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I agree Slack can be used effectively, but I don’t think its design encourages it. It encourages massive distraction — more active user time — by its default client and organization level settings. Nor do I think this is as simple as “you can simply exit the program.” If the company or team has certain expectations on communication that won’t work if you do it without consulting with your team. A lot of people are not in this sort of position where they can take an action like that and not be ostracized. Imagine ignoring calls or emails from your boss for a day or two when it’s clear that boss expects responses in a specific time? Exiting Slack can have the same effect at a lot of companies. I simply think more companies need to take the time to discuss how tools will be used and for what purposes so everyone is on the same page. We have always published an etiquette guide that is open for debate/change. But most places I’ve worked use Slack and most places simply don’t discuss how it’s used so everyone has different expectations. And being the one person trying to fix this problem in a team can make you feel crazy.
- morpheuskafka 8y ago
  If your company wants you to sit on Slack all day and not do "deep work" the that's on then, and if it's a waste of your time then it will be their wasted money. So the companies are just as invested in this as employees are.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    You also need to make sure you're doing the right "deep work". Sometimes, the problem was already solved by someone else, and there Slack can mean the difference between discovering that in a few minutes vs. a few days.
  - PeterStuer 8y ago
    It not an even trade. 'The company' is merely wasting (often someone else's) money. You on the other hand are wasting your own life-time.
- davidscolgan 8y ago
  Whether or not Slack encourages workflows (and I can see how it would), I think in order to be an effective human in the modern era _requires_ thinking critically about technology choices and how to use them. Cal Newport's new book Digital Minimalism was a great read about this - be intentional about your tech choices, and be intentional about when and how you use them. Otherwise it's super easy to just get sucked into spending all day wasting time on the most distracting and addicting sites. Company culture can be shaped (though it's definitely hard when you are on the bottom of the hierachy).
gumby 8y ago
The article explicitly says they chose asynchronous by default -- which I interpret to mean that you switch off those notifications and make slack poll-only. You talk about searching the history but to me the search tools are so weak that I figure only the recent slack messages have relevance -- instead slack is as transient as a text message. Mail at least can be searched as a corpus.
- okmokmz 8y ago
  Searching for old messages has always worked fine for me
davidscolgan 8y ago
I agree. As a remote freelancer, I'm currently in (checks the app) 5 Slacks. I have explicitly told everyone in each of those Slacks that I treat it as async only. I sometimes have it up, and sometimes don't when I'm cranking. I definitely don't have push notifications coming into anything. I've found being in Slack is a great way to feel less isolated, and conversations that might not otherwise happen happen. I also am in very small channels, usually no more than 5 people. This may contribute to why I like it. I can't imagine being in a 50-100 person Slack with everyone messaging everyone. Especially if I'm expected to keep up. The low population count makes it so that I rarely miss anything.
redwards510 8y ago
> You can always just exit the program. No, you can't, and that is the problem. If your entire team primarily uses Slack to communicate, you are forced to constantly check it or you are not being a team player.
lisper 8y ago
> You can always just exit the program. Or never start to use it in the first place. The fundamental problem with Slack is that its interactions are not structure in the right way to be useful in non-real-time. An email thread has two critical pieces of structure that Slack threads lack: a subject line, and a beginning. With email, it's easy to tell where a particular discussion started, and which messages have to do with that discussion. On Slack, these things are all intertwingled. In order to find the beginning of a discussion you have to scan everything in the channel. That is what makes Slack a distraction. It's much harder (like virtually impossible) to filter content by topic after the fact.
- llama052 8y ago
  I'd argue that they all have their place. Anything of great length that's related to something product wise that has impact should be discussed in an epic or ticket that links the main point back. As anyone who's followed a giant email chain, I think that slack is at-least a little bit easier to follow. Albeit I'm working in a company that is just now trying to start to emphasize stories/tickets/chat over email for everything, with tons of pushback. Gone are the days of email everything, tons of people are CC'd, email chains are 30-50 responses in. It's absolutely unmanageable. Oh and if you drop chat, let's start logging alerts to email, or bugs to email. It's useless. Personally I'll use chat for anything relatively quick or unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I'll use email for when it's not something that requires a response right away but generally is also unimportant to the company projects and doesn't involve a ton of collaboration. Anything bigger than that goes in a system that's suitable for tracking projects or complicated topics. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for communication.
- gamma3 8y ago
  It's possible to have structured conversations by always using threads. I've convinced everyone at two companies so far (50 and 20 people) to never reply directly in a channel, and always use threads: https://medium.com/@martinkonicek/how-to-slack-6f5bf9be71ba https://medium.com/@martinkonicek/how-to-slack-6f5bf9be71ba
  - 8y ago

smoe 8y 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 8y 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.
Tempest1981 8y ago
Exactly. Take pride in being that person who is so busy/focused that you can't be bothered to respond instantly to every discussion. Slowly train others to understand this working style.
EForEndeavour 8y ago
> If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently. This is an overly harsh assumption. There are plenty of compelling real-world examples of organized, effective people being blocked by some small but urgent thing that's not their fault and requires a few minutes of attention from someone else. If a dev just started on my project but the DB credentials I gave him aren't working (or whatever), that's on me. If my boss's boss jogs over to our office area asking who here knows Thing_X the best, I'm going to deign to remove my noise-cancelling headphones and accept the deep-work disruption.
- smoe 8y ago
  True, I'm a bit harsh on this, but I also used the word usually instead of always on purpose. Yes, sometimes someone can really get blocked and not able to work, no problem to ask for help in this case. On the other hand I have seen it enough times that people (especially juniors and bosses) continuously ask question without having bothered to think about it prior. Forcing them to deal with a problem by themselves for a bit and not distract others has resolved many of them. The key thing is being clear what communication and team culture you want to establish. I'm not just a grumpy guy that ignores messages or avoid helping others. It is something that has been discussed and agreed upon in the company and is expected to be respected by anyone no matter where the person is in the hierarchy.
  - EForEndeavour 8y ago
    Fair enough: I agree that plenty of people prematurely ask someone rather than try to figure out a solution by searching, thinking, experimenting, etc., and using Slack as an asynchronous channel will generally encourage people to hack a bit more at their problem before instinctively distracting the person next to them.

raverbashing 8y ago

> 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. This a million times Bonus points, you don't annoy other people in the office with your impromptu meeting next to someone that has nothing to do with it

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

I use Sococo for this. It has an expanded interface to increase awareness of group activity - who's talking with whom, has the meeting started, is anybody still in the office.

glvn 8y ago

I would add to this, Slack can be a fantastic tool or it can be the bane of your workday, it all comes down to how your company/team use Slack. On my team almost everything goes into the main team chat; however, every message is tagged with the person it's aimed at and any team-wide communication is tagged @here. Any sub-conversation about that top-level message happens in the message thread. With this method, you are only notified if you are tagged in a message or if a message is tagged @here. Outside of that I will check slack about once per hour and can see all top-level issues at a glance that either my team or a specific person has been notified of. If I am interested in whatever the issue is I can dive into the thread and get more information about the issue or contribute my 0.02. I see many here suggesting other software, at the end of the day that's all it is, software. The productivity drain/boost comes down to how everyone decides to use that software. If you get 100 emails a day with the subject "IMPORTANT: READ IMMEDIATELY", email suddenly becomes just as annoying and as much of a time-suck as Slack, this applies to all communication methods.

deepakhj 8y ago
I mute at here in all channels. It should be banned.
- shaggyfrog 8y ago
  It's easily the most misused feature of Slack. Using @here in a channel is the equivalent of standing on your desk and shouting at everyone around you. So what happens is, like you, everyone starts muting it. And then you just have people shouting into the void.
  - projectdelphai 8y ago
    I think you should rules about it at the workplace. At mine, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've seen an @here. And one of them, the person was told he shouldn't have done it since it wasn't important. Really makes everything think before they use it.
    - 8y ago

e40 8y ago

Slack can be a terrible tool if you let it, but it can be wonderful, too, if you tune your notifications, and use DnD when you need it. Also, schedule DnD for non-work hours so you are never bothered outside of work hours, unless there is a true emergency (and if you work at a place with a lot of emergencies, then you have a shitty workplace). It's a tool. Use the tool, don't let the tool use you.

xfitm3 8y ago
Slack is hostile to users and panders to management. It's a sound business strategy. I can't trust the platform, I'll always be second class. What about scheduled DnD for days off? Ability to /ignore annoying bots? Two basic features which should've been added long ago.
- lostdog 8y ago
  Those features plus the ability to ignore @here from only certain users would make a huge difference.
- e40 8y ago
  Slack is hostile to users and panders to management. It's a sound business strategy. I can't trust the platform, I'll always be second class. That is very vague. Sounds like you have an axe to grind with your management. What about scheduled DnD for days off? Ability to /ignore annoying bots? Two basic features which should've been added long ago. Good feature idea. Have you submitted them? As for as DnD scheduling for PTO, they have custom which I use on my last day. Works perfectly for me. As for /ignore for bots, sounds like the people controlling your Slack need a suggestion or two.
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    DnD scheduling for Sat/Sun.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

I agree Slack can be used effectively, but I don’t think its design encourages it. It encourages massive distraction — more active user time — by its default client and organization level settings. Nor do I think this is as simple as “you can simply exit the program.” If the company or team has certain expectations on communication that won’t work if you do it without consulting with your team. A lot of people are not in this sort of position where they can take an action like that and not be ostracized. Imagine ignoring calls or emails from your boss for a day or two when it’s clear that boss expects responses in a specific time? Exiting Slack can have the same effect at a lot of companies. I simply think more companies need to take the time to discuss how tools will be used and for what purposes so everyone is on the same page. We have always published an etiquette guide that is open for debate/change. But most places I’ve worked use Slack and most places simply don’t discuss how it’s used so everyone has different expectations. And being the one person trying to fix this problem in a team can make you feel crazy.

morpheuskafka 8y ago
If your company wants you to sit on Slack all day and not do "deep work" the that's on then, and if it's a waste of your time then it will be their wasted money. So the companies are just as invested in this as employees are.
- aeternus 8y ago
  You also need to make sure you're doing the right "deep work". Sometimes, the problem was already solved by someone else, and there Slack can mean the difference between discovering that in a few minutes vs. a few days.
- PeterStuer 8y ago
  It not an even trade. 'The company' is merely wasting (often someone else's) money. You on the other hand are wasting your own life-time.
davidscolgan 8y ago
Whether or not Slack encourages workflows (and I can see how it would), I think in order to be an effective human in the modern era _requires_ thinking critically about technology choices and how to use them. Cal Newport's new book Digital Minimalism was a great read about this - be intentional about your tech choices, and be intentional about when and how you use them. Otherwise it's super easy to just get sucked into spending all day wasting time on the most distracting and addicting sites. Company culture can be shaped (though it's definitely hard when you are on the bottom of the hierachy).

gumby 8y ago

The article explicitly says they chose asynchronous by default -- which I interpret to mean that you switch off those notifications and make slack poll-only. You talk about searching the history but to me the search tools are so weak that I figure only the recent slack messages have relevance -- instead slack is as transient as a text message. Mail at least can be searched as a corpus.

okmokmz 8y ago
Searching for old messages has always worked fine for me

davidscolgan 8y ago

I agree. As a remote freelancer, I'm currently in (checks the app) 5 Slacks. I have explicitly told everyone in each of those Slacks that I treat it as async only. I sometimes have it up, and sometimes don't when I'm cranking. I definitely don't have push notifications coming into anything. I've found being in Slack is a great way to feel less isolated, and conversations that might not otherwise happen happen. I also am in very small channels, usually no more than 5 people. This may contribute to why I like it. I can't imagine being in a 50-100 person Slack with everyone messaging everyone. Especially if I'm expected to keep up. The low population count makes it so that I rarely miss anything.

redwards510 8y ago

> You can always just exit the program. No, you can't, and that is the problem. If your entire team primarily uses Slack to communicate, you are forced to constantly check it or you are not being a team player.

lisper 8y ago

> You can always just exit the program. Or never start to use it in the first place. The fundamental problem with Slack is that its interactions are not structure in the right way to be useful in non-real-time. An email thread has two critical pieces of structure that Slack threads lack: a subject line, and a beginning. With email, it's easy to tell where a particular discussion started, and which messages have to do with that discussion. On Slack, these things are all intertwingled. In order to find the beginning of a discussion you have to scan everything in the channel. That is what makes Slack a distraction. It's much harder (like virtually impossible) to filter content by topic after the fact.

llama052 8y ago
I'd argue that they all have their place. Anything of great length that's related to something product wise that has impact should be discussed in an epic or ticket that links the main point back. As anyone who's followed a giant email chain, I think that slack is at-least a little bit easier to follow. Albeit I'm working in a company that is just now trying to start to emphasize stories/tickets/chat over email for everything, with tons of pushback. Gone are the days of email everything, tons of people are CC'd, email chains are 30-50 responses in. It's absolutely unmanageable. Oh and if you drop chat, let's start logging alerts to email, or bugs to email. It's useless. Personally I'll use chat for anything relatively quick or unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I'll use email for when it's not something that requires a response right away but generally is also unimportant to the company projects and doesn't involve a ton of collaboration. Anything bigger than that goes in a system that's suitable for tracking projects or complicated topics. I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for communication.
gamma3 8y ago
It's possible to have structured conversations by always using threads. I've convinced everyone at two companies so far (50 and 20 people) to never reply directly in a channel, and always use threads: https://medium.com/@martinkonicek/how-to-slack-6f5bf9be71ba https://medium.com/@martinkonicek/how-to-slack-6f5bf9be71ba
- 8y ago