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Slack only works for companies where the nature of their employees' work actually requires team communication that will benefit the organizations. Like everyth

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 8y 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.

gregmac 8y 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.