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I have said this before but the way Slack is used today is most of the time a net negative of the modern workplace. And I will agree that it's mainly because p

I have said this before but the way Slack is used today is most of the time a net negative of the modern workplace. And I will agree that it's mainly because people use it badly but Slack encourages to use it as a dopamine fix contributing to an ever lower attention span in the workspace. An IM tool is needed in the modern workspace but it should be seen as the last resort. A synchronous answer should not be expected. Instead, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email and is being used as the single place where all the discussions are going on in real-time, making it extremely difficult to work on a complex task without taking the risk of missing an important decision/discussion. I find it amazing that this tool is used unquestionably by every small/medium company without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit.

Kiro 7y ago
That trope was old before but is even more irrelevant in these turbulent times when people are forced to work from home. What are you suggesting as an alternative?
- bvandewalle 7y ago
  I disagree, Slack became the online equivalent of "butts in seats" and in those turbulent times it has more potential than ever to be wrongly used. I think it's partially the company culture that should make it clear that no substantial discussion or decisions should be made on the IM tool (Slack or something else). The issue is that Slack (the product) goes against creating such a culture. Email is still a way better tool for long complex asynchronous opinionated discussions. What I find the most damaging is the expectation that you should always be online watching all your channels in order to not miss some bit of information (or show that you are online, busy, doing work).
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    > Email is still a way better tool for long complex asynchronous opinionated discussions. Yup. Every time you have a product discussion in Slack, it’s like taking a $100 bill and lighting it on fire.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    >Email is still a way better tool for long complex asynchronous opinionated discussions. Every experienced and/or powerful person I've worked with felt and preached exactly the opposite: whatever happens, absolutely do not ever have a complex conversation over email. Pick up a phone, schedule a meeting, walk over to them, just make the decision unilaterally, literally anything else.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      That may be your personal experience, but I doubt that it's universal. Consider the reported policy at Amazon of requiring several pages of written document for every meeting in order to ensure the functioning of that meeting. That's a pretty strong emphasis on the asynchronously written word. Apparently they still do have meetings, but that may be simply a vehicle for psychological alignment more than for actual detailed discussion.
      - OJFord 7y ago
        Those documents are famously read synchronously in silence at the start of those meetings though.
        jessaustin 7y ago
        I never worked there, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out some managers expect it to be read before the meeting so we can start it on time. Those managers would be likely to communicate that preference forcefully at the start of the meeting.
      - closeparen 7y ago
        Oh, there are plenty of cases where people ask me to write documents. They don’t read them though. They’re just props I’m expected to have when explaining verbally in the meeting.
    - qznc 7y ago
      To make decisions quickly, I totally agree. If you want to understand the why, it is essential to have it in writing. If the problem is complex, then one guy writing for 30 minutes can provide more clarity than 5 discussing for an hour.
  - op03 7y ago
    While I share some of your feelings about IM at work I have learnt it depends on the personalities within the team. Extroverts and Introverts have different needs. Throw in the needs of Creatives or Agreeable people into the mix and there is a very wide spectrum of different needs. Assuming all can communicate one way with one tool is a bad idea. Good managers/leaders have some intuitive sense of this. Especially during crisis. Trait differences and unmet needs get amplified if not handled sensitively. So whatever heuristics you want to develop on top of your observations - take personalities within your team into account - they all handle stress/info overload differently - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory#Personality_dimensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent...
  - pilsetnieks 7y ago
    > What I find the most damaging is the expectation that you should always be online watching all your channels in order to not miss some bit of information (or show that you are online, busy, doing work). That sounds either like toxic work culture or maybe the way slack is used in your company has created assumptions that may not be entirely warranted. Where I work, there is no such expectation. If it's something urgent, people use @-messages so the recipient gets a notification, with reasonable care not to abuse them. If it's anything else, it's normal messages which can be read when convenient. Some, including me, turn off Slack entirely when diving deep into some task but I still get phone notifications for @-messages and a couple of keywords I've set up for urgent matters. If people appreciate each others time and attention, it's actually a fairly pleasant tool to use. We're not a large team, though, maybe it's different in larger orgs.
erikbye 7y ago
You seem stuck in the past and project your problems onto others. For many, IM and chat rooms do not cause productivity problems. Different companies use Slack and other tools in their own way, have their own policies as to what is expected and what not. The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you. Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.
- growse 7y ago
  > Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. I think this is a useful way of looking at it - the medium governs the expectation of response. An email basically never expects a response, an "@" in slack expects a response at some point, and a phone call is "I AM MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING YOU MIGHT BE DOING RIGHT NOW TALK TO ME". Slack etc. are obviously useful in filling the middle ground between the two extremes. > Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. I sort of disagree with this. Being expected to drop everything that you're doing and deal with whoever wants to engage with you at any point is a really bad pattern. If someone's got to the point where they're blocked on a single person responding to something, then that's a really bad smell for some process and organisational failings. People should be able to own and manage their time. That doesn't mean they get to close themselves off from the world and ignore everyone, but it also doesn't make them an on-demand slave to their colleagues.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    An email basically never expects a response This might be a SV thing, because I can assure you that many, many e-mails require a response elsewhere including government. Failure to respond to some emails will result in a loss of funding or your job.
tduberne 7y ago
On that topic, I really like David Allen's "hierarchy of communication channels" (name is mine) in Getting Things Done. He says that when you need to discuss something with someone, you should consider the following communication channels, in that order: - e-mail - leave hand written note on desk/in pigeon hole - send IM/text message. - put topic on a "list of things to discuss i next meeting" - phone call/face to face You should choose the first that fits the urgency of the situation. The idea being to maximize trackability and minimize disruptions. In the current Slack culture, I actually put IM just before phone call, given the expectation of quick answer most people have.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I'd probably put "ask them face-to-face during lunchtime" first. Email feels like quite a heavy cannon for many things.
  - maccard 7y ago
    > "ask them face-to-face during lunchtime" Please, please, please don't do this. A lunch break should be a break, not a meeting while eating. Even if you don't mind working throuhg your lunch, others might.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      Haha, I meant this for people who already talk about work stuff during lunch. Not with people who'd prefer not to.
    - nogabebop23 7y ago
      Interesting take. We talk about work-ish things at lunch quite often. It seems to be more of a break from doing work vs. a moratorium on thinking/discussing work-related things. I mean, a huge number of my relationships with coworkers are solely based on working together; what other common ground do we share?
    - gowld 7y ago
      Still, asking right before/after lunch is less interrupting.
jasode 7y ago
>, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email [...] Yes, I empathize your perspective which is very common common among people who want to concentrate without interruptions. Donald Knuth is an extreme example of not wanting to be interrupted -- not even with async email.[1] However your cause & effect of why chat/Slack is popular is not correct. Chat apps are more of a replacement for walking up to a coworker's cubicle or desk and interrupting them face-to-face. >[...] without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit. It's a productivity benefit to the people who are doing the interrupting. We don't work in an office full of "Donald Knuths" who don't want to bother each other. Because the interrupters outnumber the deep thinkers, that's why a chat tool like AIM/YahooMessenger/Skype/Whatsapp/Slack/etc dominates. I previously mentioned how early Facebook programmers chatted on instant messaging (AOL AIM ~9 years before Slack) even though they sat next to each other.[2] Their behavior is not replacing "email". They are replacing "realtime speech" without making verbal sounds. If one doesn't understand that, you'll always be mystified why email isn't used in place of instant messaging! Email is less ergonomic than chat. Email has extra friction of entering a "subject:" line before the body of the text. Chat doesn't need a subject line because the chat room is already the implied subject. Email also has extra friction of hitting "reply" button instead of just typing. Email is oriented around the "inbox". Chat is oriented around people who are actively online. Likewise, when my mom texts me an SMS on my smartphone, she isn't replacing email. She's replacing a phone call. [1] do a mental search & replace : s/email/chat s/snailmail/email ...on this excerpt from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html: >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. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. >On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783
mlindner 7y ago
I never used email growing up. Real time chat has always been a much more effective method of communication. Email just causes confusion as people misinterpret questions and then write long-winded answers to the question that they misunderstood resulting in a waste of time for both parties. Iterative back and forth communication is key to figuring out an issue. Email does not work. Email needs to die.
- sdoering 7y ago
  Email is the most efficient way to communicate if one can communicate clearly. It is a way straight to hell if one can't. It is a tool. It can be used. Or abused.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    People who don't read comfortably don't like email. (They also don't like closed captioning.) We can't organize the workplace around their preferences, however.
davedx 7y ago
Our team has become more productive since the switch to fully remote, and we use Slack all the time to facilitate our communications. Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default. I occasionally turn on notifications for our automated system alerting Slack channel, usually when I'm not actually at my computer. One thing I do think we do as Slack users is rely on it too much as a general information dump: even with the history, stuff gets lost. Slack is no replacement for wikis or other more static information repositories, make sure you extract valuable knowledge out and put it somewhere more suitable (and findable).
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Is Slack extensible for an async mention/message? I know as the user you can change the notification settings for different channels, but can the sender explicitly state this message is not vital/immediate?
  - dkdk8283 7y ago
    Not that I’ve found, and even in DnD the favicon updates making you realize someone is waiting. I hate Slack.
  - simonw 7y ago
    Create channels that are explicitly described as being for non-immediate communications and get your team to use those for that kind of conversation. I try to create a culture where most channels are like that, and only a few channels have an expectation of urgent / immediate replies. Then I turn on notifications for all messages in those channels.
    - nogabebop23 7y ago
      >> Create channels that are explicitly described as being for non-immediate communications and get your team to use those for that kind of conversation. This sounds a lot like an email thread.
- PragmaticPulp 7y ago
morganvachon 7y ago
We (small business with 7 employees at desks and another 5 on the floor) use it exactly the way you suggest. As the sole IT staff, I get the most messages from the other employees, and send out the most, with the company president close behind me. Two online sales staff, the lead shipping clerk, and the physical store manager follow from there. The warehouse manager doesn't bother with it, and the CFO detests the idea of it (she's also one of the oldest team members at 49). Most communication is by email, SMS/iMessage, face to face (though we are reducing that due to current concerns), 2-way radio, and phone, in that order. Slack is mainly for sharing the odd file or link, or for staff to reach me for computer related issues that require me to see something rather than hear it (screenshot, etc). We could go with any other messaging service, and before Slack we used Skype, but Slack at our level is free, easy, and runs on all platforms we use. The idea of it "replacing" email, phone, and radio comms is ludicrous to us. I can't imagine how it can work that way in larger organizations.
- jonfw 7y ago
  My team of 200 people's sole form of communication is in slack. The only emails we get are calendar invites to meetings. I genuinely don't understand the problem with that. Slack is great- it's synchronous when you want it to be, and it's asynchronous when somebody is busy. It's easy to search through stuff, and since all of the other teams in my company use it, I can reach out to anybody in the company at any time.
pixelrevision 7y ago
It’s pretty typical of the manager/employee tool adoption cycle. Slack is 100% a net positive if your job description requires you monitor multiple things to make sure they are all ok and resolve issues in a timely manner. As usual people with this job description often get to pick the tools used and don’t see why it’s not “so fun” for their employees to keep up with the firehose they’ve inserted in their computer/phone.
- gowld 7y ago
  It's not managers spamming slack channels. It's people discussing issues.
- ido 7y ago
  You can easily mute channels you're not interested in or are too high traffic tho? I usually mute most channels except for a handful I use for my current project/team. And when I need to concentrate I put slack itself in "do not disturb" mode (usually a couple times per day but not for very long each). Also make heavy use of threads and starting new channels to keep from having a handful of "general" channels that are both high traffic and containing a lot of important info.
empath75 7y ago
I think slack’s secret sauce isn’t actually the day to day team work stuff but the cross team communication and fun aspects of it. I’m on a slack team at work that has 50k people in it spread across 5 cities and sometimes multiple offices in each city. There are topics to talk about almost anything you’re interested in from board games to parenting to woodworking to whatever. I think it makes the whole company feel connected to each other as people in a way that email or face to face meetings or phone conversations or regular instant messenger could never accomplish. And that ability to make spontaneous connections extends to business related topics as well — I spent about an hour just randomly helping someone on a team that I knew only from slack design a kubernetes deployment and took a project from struggling to get off the ground to going full speed ahead. I switched to a machine learning team here despite having zero work experience doing machine learning because I spend time in the machine learning channel and demonstrated that I had interest and knowledge of the topic. It works _because_ it’s fun and distracting, not in spite of that, imo. My actual team never uses it because we’re all sitting next to each other, usually, and our support channel is only ever manned by the engineer on call. It’s all the so-called non-productive uses that make it great.
- nogabebop23 7y ago
  >> 50k people in it spread across 5 cities ... I think it makes the whole company feel connected to each other It may help make you feel this way, but what type of connection can you have with superfulous interaction in such a large population? Maybe you mean it helped you identify very small, niche subsets with which you have subsequently built a relationship? That makes more sense, but I'm highly akeptical that even those relationships are built in an IM network, more likely triggered by... You side-band, async focus is not how the vast majority of organizations use slack. They explicitly adopt it as the required (i.e. everyone participates) tool for immediate, synchronous communication.
Waterluvian 7y ago
To each their opinion but I work remote, which is so modern and logical and amazing that I vow never to take a non-remote job again. Slack is critical to my job.
crocal 7y ago
I think you answered your own question with the ´Dopamine’ comment. Slack clearly has an addictive game effect on its users. And since it pleases the crowd and has no visible downside, it’s tempting for busy small/medium business owner to just let it sail initially.
montagg 7y ago
No tool is going to do the job of establishing boundaries with your team members so you can do your best work. You decide that. Any tool can be positive or negative depending on its use and context. I do deep work and have no problem using Slack because my team talks about how we can use it best, and we use it that way.
golergka 7y ago
It really depends on the culture. When I write code, I close all chat apps, and check them for notifications every 2-4 hours. Everyone who works with me knows it and understands the reasons behind it. They have my phone number in a case of a real emergency. You're in charge of your own productivity and your own work patterns. Train your coworkers to respect them.
helij 7y ago
I moved from a job with Slack to a job without Slack. Finding myself more productive. Some people use Slack but since I saw on the first day that it is not the main medium for comms I now outright refuse to use it anytime anyone mentions it. Nobody seems bothered and email, phone and in person is prefered. And we all (15 employees) regularly worked from home even before this situation.
_bxg1 7y ago
> making it extremely difficult to work on a complex task without taking the risk of missing an important decision/discussion Is this any less true for any other digital communication medium? If the issue is things getting lost in the chat history, typically in my experience important discussions that we want to preserve will happen in a different place; comments on tickets or PRs, google doc annotations, etc. Slack is a "scratch pad" for discussion.

Kiro 7y ago

That trope was old before but is even more irrelevant in these turbulent times when people are forced to work from home. What are you suggesting as an alternative?

bvandewalle 7y ago
I disagree, Slack became the online equivalent of "butts in seats" and in those turbulent times it has more potential than ever to be wrongly used. I think it's partially the company culture that should make it clear that no substantial discussion or decisions should be made on the IM tool (Slack or something else). The issue is that Slack (the product) goes against creating such a culture. Email is still a way better tool for long complex asynchronous opinionated discussions. What I find the most damaging is the expectation that you should always be online watching all your channels in order to not miss some bit of information (or show that you are online, busy, doing work).
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > Email is still a way better tool for long complex asynchronous opinionated discussions. Yup. Every time you have a product discussion in Slack, it’s like taking a $100 bill and lighting it on fire.
- closeparen 7y ago
  >Email is still a way better tool for long complex asynchronous opinionated discussions. Every experienced and/or powerful person I've worked with felt and preached exactly the opposite: whatever happens, absolutely do not ever have a complex conversation over email. Pick up a phone, schedule a meeting, walk over to them, just make the decision unilaterally, literally anything else.
  - atq2119 7y ago
    That may be your personal experience, but I doubt that it's universal. Consider the reported policy at Amazon of requiring several pages of written document for every meeting in order to ensure the functioning of that meeting. That's a pretty strong emphasis on the asynchronously written word. Apparently they still do have meetings, but that may be simply a vehicle for psychological alignment more than for actual detailed discussion.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      Those documents are famously read synchronously in silence at the start of those meetings though.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        I never worked there, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out some managers expect it to be read before the meeting so we can start it on time. Those managers would be likely to communicate that preference forcefully at the start of the meeting.
    - closeparen 7y ago
      Oh, there are plenty of cases where people ask me to write documents. They don’t read them though. They’re just props I’m expected to have when explaining verbally in the meeting.
  - qznc 7y ago
    To make decisions quickly, I totally agree. If you want to understand the why, it is essential to have it in writing. If the problem is complex, then one guy writing for 30 minutes can provide more clarity than 5 discussing for an hour.
- op03 7y ago
  While I share some of your feelings about IM at work I have learnt it depends on the personalities within the team. Extroverts and Introverts have different needs. Throw in the needs of Creatives or Agreeable people into the mix and there is a very wide spectrum of different needs. Assuming all can communicate one way with one tool is a bad idea. Good managers/leaders have some intuitive sense of this. Especially during crisis. Trait differences and unmet needs get amplified if not handled sensitively. So whatever heuristics you want to develop on top of your observations - take personalities within your team into account - they all handle stress/info overload differently - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory#Personality_dimensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent...
- pilsetnieks 7y ago
  > What I find the most damaging is the expectation that you should always be online watching all your channels in order to not miss some bit of information (or show that you are online, busy, doing work). That sounds either like toxic work culture or maybe the way slack is used in your company has created assumptions that may not be entirely warranted. Where I work, there is no such expectation. If it's something urgent, people use @-messages so the recipient gets a notification, with reasonable care not to abuse them. If it's anything else, it's normal messages which can be read when convenient. Some, including me, turn off Slack entirely when diving deep into some task but I still get phone notifications for @-messages and a couple of keywords I've set up for urgent matters. If people appreciate each others time and attention, it's actually a fairly pleasant tool to use. We're not a large team, though, maybe it's different in larger orgs.

erikbye 7y ago

You seem stuck in the past and project your problems onto others. For many, IM and chat rooms do not cause productivity problems. Different companies use Slack and other tools in their own way, have their own policies as to what is expected and what not. The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you. Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.

growse 7y ago
> Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. I think this is a useful way of looking at it - the medium governs the expectation of response. An email basically never expects a response, an "@" in slack expects a response at some point, and a phone call is "I AM MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING YOU MIGHT BE DOING RIGHT NOW TALK TO ME". Slack etc. are obviously useful in filling the middle ground between the two extremes. > Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. I sort of disagree with this. Being expected to drop everything that you're doing and deal with whoever wants to engage with you at any point is a really bad pattern. If someone's got to the point where they're blocked on a single person responding to something, then that's a really bad smell for some process and organisational failings. People should be able to own and manage their time. That doesn't mean they get to close themselves off from the world and ignore everyone, but it also doesn't make them an on-demand slave to their colleagues.
- protomyth 7y ago
  An email basically never expects a response This might be a SV thing, because I can assure you that many, many e-mails require a response elsewhere including government. Failure to respond to some emails will result in a loss of funding or your job.

tduberne 7y ago

On that topic, I really like David Allen's "hierarchy of communication channels" (name is mine) in Getting Things Done. He says that when you need to discuss something with someone, you should consider the following communication channels, in that order: - e-mail - leave hand written note on desk/in pigeon hole - send IM/text message. - put topic on a "list of things to discuss i next meeting" - phone call/face to face You should choose the first that fits the urgency of the situation. The idea being to maximize trackability and minimize disruptions. In the current Slack culture, I actually put IM just before phone call, given the expectation of quick answer most people have.

mehrdadn 7y ago
I'd probably put "ask them face-to-face during lunchtime" first. Email feels like quite a heavy cannon for many things.
- maccard 7y ago
  > "ask them face-to-face during lunchtime" Please, please, please don't do this. A lunch break should be a break, not a meeting while eating. Even if you don't mind working throuhg your lunch, others might.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    Haha, I meant this for people who already talk about work stuff during lunch. Not with people who'd prefer not to.
  - nogabebop23 7y ago
    Interesting take. We talk about work-ish things at lunch quite often. It seems to be more of a break from doing work vs. a moratorium on thinking/discussing work-related things. I mean, a huge number of my relationships with coworkers are solely based on working together; what other common ground do we share?
  - gowld 7y ago
    Still, asking right before/after lunch is less interrupting.

jasode 7y ago

>, Slack has been pushed as the replacement of email [...] Yes, I empathize your perspective which is very common common among people who want to concentrate without interruptions. Donald Knuth is an extreme example of not wanting to be interrupted -- not even with async email.[1] However your cause & effect of why chat/Slack is popular is not correct. Chat apps are more of a replacement for walking up to a coworker's cubicle or desk and interrupting them face-to-face. >[...] without ever wondering if it really provides a productivity benefit. It's a productivity benefit to the people who are doing the interrupting. We don't work in an office full of "Donald Knuths" who don't want to bother each other. Because the interrupters outnumber the deep thinkers, that's why a chat tool like AIM/YahooMessenger/Skype/Whatsapp/Slack/etc dominates. I previously mentioned how early Facebook programmers chatted on instant messaging (AOL AIM ~9 years before Slack) even though they sat next to each other.[2] Their behavior is not replacing "email". They are replacing "realtime speech" without making verbal sounds. If one doesn't understand that, you'll always be mystified why email isn't used in place of instant messaging! Email is less ergonomic than chat. Email has extra friction of entering a "subject:" line before the body of the text. Chat doesn't need a subject line because the chat room is already the implied subject. Email also has extra friction of hitting "reply" button instead of just typing. Email is oriented around the "inbox". Chat is oriented around people who are actively online. Likewise, when my mom texts me an SMS on my smartphone, she isn't replacing email. She's replacing a phone call. [1] do a mental search & replace : s/email/chat s/snailmail/email ...on this excerpt from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html: >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. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. >On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every six months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321783

mlindner 7y ago

I never used email growing up. Real time chat has always been a much more effective method of communication. Email just causes confusion as people misinterpret questions and then write long-winded answers to the question that they misunderstood resulting in a waste of time for both parties. Iterative back and forth communication is key to figuring out an issue. Email does not work. Email needs to die.

sdoering 7y ago
Email is the most efficient way to communicate if one can communicate clearly. It is a way straight to hell if one can't. It is a tool. It can be used. Or abused.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  People who don't read comfortably don't like email. (They also don't like closed captioning.) We can't organize the workplace around their preferences, however.

davedx 7y ago

Our team has become more productive since the switch to fully remote, and we use Slack all the time to facilitate our communications. Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default. I occasionally turn on notifications for our automated system alerting Slack channel, usually when I'm not actually at my computer. One thing I do think we do as Slack users is rely on it too much as a general information dump: even with the history, stuff gets lost. Slack is no replacement for wikis or other more static information repositories, make sure you extract valuable knowledge out and put it somewhere more suitable (and findable).

Brakenshire 7y ago
Is Slack extensible for an async mention/message? I know as the user you can change the notification settings for different channels, but can the sender explicitly state this message is not vital/immediate?
- dkdk8283 7y ago
  Not that I’ve found, and even in DnD the favicon updates making you realize someone is waiting. I hate Slack.
- simonw 7y ago
  Create channels that are explicitly described as being for non-immediate communications and get your team to use those for that kind of conversation. I try to create a culture where most channels are like that, and only a few channels have an expectation of urgent / immediate replies. Then I turn on notifications for all messages in those channels.
  - nogabebop23 7y ago
    >> Create channels that are explicitly described as being for non-immediate communications and get your team to use those for that kind of conversation. This sounds a lot like an email thread.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago

morganvachon 7y ago

We (small business with 7 employees at desks and another 5 on the floor) use it exactly the way you suggest. As the sole IT staff, I get the most messages from the other employees, and send out the most, with the company president close behind me. Two online sales staff, the lead shipping clerk, and the physical store manager follow from there. The warehouse manager doesn't bother with it, and the CFO detests the idea of it (she's also one of the oldest team members at 49). Most communication is by email, SMS/iMessage, face to face (though we are reducing that due to current concerns), 2-way radio, and phone, in that order. Slack is mainly for sharing the odd file or link, or for staff to reach me for computer related issues that require me to see something rather than hear it (screenshot, etc). We could go with any other messaging service, and before Slack we used Skype, but Slack at our level is free, easy, and runs on all platforms we use. The idea of it "replacing" email, phone, and radio comms is ludicrous to us. I can't imagine how it can work that way in larger organizations.

jonfw 7y ago
My team of 200 people's sole form of communication is in slack. The only emails we get are calendar invites to meetings. I genuinely don't understand the problem with that. Slack is great- it's synchronous when you want it to be, and it's asynchronous when somebody is busy. It's easy to search through stuff, and since all of the other teams in my company use it, I can reach out to anybody in the company at any time.

pixelrevision 7y ago

It’s pretty typical of the manager/employee tool adoption cycle. Slack is 100% a net positive if your job description requires you monitor multiple things to make sure they are all ok and resolve issues in a timely manner. As usual people with this job description often get to pick the tools used and don’t see why it’s not “so fun” for their employees to keep up with the firehose they’ve inserted in their computer/phone.

gowld 7y ago
It's not managers spamming slack channels. It's people discussing issues.
ido 7y ago
You can easily mute channels you're not interested in or are too high traffic tho? I usually mute most channels except for a handful I use for my current project/team. And when I need to concentrate I put slack itself in "do not disturb" mode (usually a couple times per day but not for very long each). Also make heavy use of threads and starting new channels to keep from having a handful of "general" channels that are both high traffic and containing a lot of important info.

empath75 7y ago

I think slack’s secret sauce isn’t actually the day to day team work stuff but the cross team communication and fun aspects of it. I’m on a slack team at work that has 50k people in it spread across 5 cities and sometimes multiple offices in each city. There are topics to talk about almost anything you’re interested in from board games to parenting to woodworking to whatever. I think it makes the whole company feel connected to each other as people in a way that email or face to face meetings or phone conversations or regular instant messenger could never accomplish. And that ability to make spontaneous connections extends to business related topics as well — I spent about an hour just randomly helping someone on a team that I knew only from slack design a kubernetes deployment and took a project from struggling to get off the ground to going full speed ahead. I switched to a machine learning team here despite having zero work experience doing machine learning because I spend time in the machine learning channel and demonstrated that I had interest and knowledge of the topic. It works _because_ it’s fun and distracting, not in spite of that, imo. My actual team never uses it because we’re all sitting next to each other, usually, and our support channel is only ever manned by the engineer on call. It’s all the so-called non-productive uses that make it great.

nogabebop23 7y ago
>> 50k people in it spread across 5 cities ... I think it makes the whole company feel connected to each other It may help make you feel this way, but what type of connection can you have with superfulous interaction in such a large population? Maybe you mean it helped you identify very small, niche subsets with which you have subsequently built a relationship? That makes more sense, but I'm highly akeptical that even those relationships are built in an IM network, more likely triggered by... You side-band, async focus is not how the vast majority of organizations use slack. They explicitly adopt it as the required (i.e. everyone participates) tool for immediate, synchronous communication.

Waterluvian 7y ago

To each their opinion but I work remote, which is so modern and logical and amazing that I vow never to take a non-remote job again. Slack is critical to my job.

crocal 7y ago

I think you answered your own question with the ´Dopamine’ comment. Slack clearly has an addictive game effect on its users. And since it pleases the crowd and has no visible downside, it’s tempting for busy small/medium business owner to just let it sail initially.

montagg 7y ago

No tool is going to do the job of establishing boundaries with your team members so you can do your best work. You decide that. Any tool can be positive or negative depending on its use and context. I do deep work and have no problem using Slack because my team talks about how we can use it best, and we use it that way.

golergka 7y ago

It really depends on the culture. When I write code, I close all chat apps, and check them for notifications every 2-4 hours. Everyone who works with me knows it and understands the reasons behind it. They have my phone number in a case of a real emergency. You're in charge of your own productivity and your own work patterns. Train your coworkers to respect them.

helij 7y ago

I moved from a job with Slack to a job without Slack. Finding myself more productive. Some people use Slack but since I saw on the first day that it is not the main medium for comms I now outright refuse to use it anytime anyone mentions it. Nobody seems bothered and email, phone and in person is prefered. And we all (15 employees) regularly worked from home even before this situation.

_bxg1 7y ago

> making it extremely difficult to work on a complex task without taking the risk of missing an important decision/discussion Is this any less true for any other digital communication medium? If the issue is things getting lost in the chat history, typically in my experience important discussions that we want to preserve will happen in a different place; comments on tickets or PRs, google doc annotations, etc. Slack is a "scratch pad" for discussion.