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Tools like Slack and Teams are focus-killers and should be banned from all companies that want to work efficiently. The synchronous nature of these tools and th

by cudgy 5y ago

Tools like Slack and Teams are focus-killers and should be banned from all companies that want to work efficiently. The synchronous nature of these tools and the chatty blather they encourage should be avoided by all serious knowledge workers.

skinkestek 5y ago
Compared to people calling or finding me at my desk they are extremely asynchronous. What tool do you suggest for teams?
- cudgy 5y ago
  Simple … email … I choose when/if I will respond on a schedule that I define and My response can be more complete therefore avoiding many of the roundtrips that these tools support and encourage. If someone needs a meeting, they can schedule a meeting from open time that I have provided in my schedule that is shared to my team.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    It is what you make of it. I have tens or hundreds of unread slack messages. I also know people in the Blackberry era who'd call somelne because they hadn't yet replied to a mail they send a whole 5 minutes ago..!
dagw 5y ago
The "chatty blather" is a culture 'problem' (assuming you see it as a problem), not a tools problem. Where I'm working now we only have channels directly connected to specific projects and only people working on those projects are on those channels, and there is no project irrelevant chatter happening. There are no company wide channels and no 'off topic' channels so very little social banter takes place on Slack or Teams. Personally I think the problem is over-rated and wouldn't mind if there was a bit more off topic chat going on in our Slack/Teams.
- cudgy 5y ago
  What is the purpose of the tool then? What improvement does it have over email? The main problem that I have with these tools is the increased number of distractions. There is an expectation when using a chat tool that someone will respond promptly, but this rarely is useful for the person that’s receiving the question. For most knowledge workers, frequent distractions come at a very high cost. Notions that we are good at multitasking are completely false. Encouraging the use of these tools is contrary to the goals of deep intelligent work And in fact can encourage poor planning and time management.
  - dagw 5y ago
    What improvement does it have over email? One is that everything gets sorted under the right project subheading. Discussions about Project FooBar end up in a different channel than discussions about Project Blork. The second is that I can just post on the Blork channel and know that everybody currently connected to project Blork will see it. Equally if I'm not actively working on FooBar I can easily ignore everything connected to FooBar, and just scan through what's happening every other day or so. I personally feel it's useful keep an eye on what is happening in projects tangentially related to what I'm working on without being CC:d on every project related email sent, and Slack makes that easy. Of course all this can be replicated with mailing lists, email filtering, and decent threading support in your mail client, and perhaps that might even be better, but for whatever reason the tools for easily doing this aren't really being pushed. I'm sure you could build some sort of tools on top of email that gives you most of the benefits of Slack but with a slightly less synchronous feel.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      There were tools called bulletin boards or wikis created decades ago that can accomplish what is described above. All of these chatty tools require discipline by those making posts to not refer to other projects within the silo of the channel. I’ve found this to almost never happen. Email allows for normal conversational encompassing communication method that does not rely upon siloing information about projects into their respective channels. For example, if Blork and FooBar Projects are related In a comment that is made in one of the project channels, it is not easy to navigate their relationships in these tools Without explicitly adding tags to refer to the other channels. All these tags then create a spiderweb of useless links for the most part, and the information flow is weird and difficult to follow in many cases. This model can be advantageous for example when referencing checkins or other tickets within comments of a bug/story reporting system. However, bug reporting systems typically have fewer parties involved in the comments, so things don’t get quite as out of hand.
anoncake 5y ago
Maybe that's why companies use Teams? Because people only use it when they must?

by cudgy 5y ago

skinkestek 5y ago

Compared to people calling or finding me at my desk they are extremely asynchronous. What tool do you suggest for teams?

cudgy 5y ago
Simple … email … I choose when/if I will respond on a schedule that I define and My response can be more complete therefore avoiding many of the roundtrips that these tools support and encourage. If someone needs a meeting, they can schedule a meeting from open time that I have provided in my schedule that is shared to my team.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  It is what you make of it. I have tens or hundreds of unread slack messages. I also know people in the Blackberry era who'd call somelne because they hadn't yet replied to a mail they send a whole 5 minutes ago..!

dagw 5y ago

The "chatty blather" is a culture 'problem' (assuming you see it as a problem), not a tools problem. Where I'm working now we only have channels directly connected to specific projects and only people working on those projects are on those channels, and there is no project irrelevant chatter happening. There are no company wide channels and no 'off topic' channels so very little social banter takes place on Slack or Teams. Personally I think the problem is over-rated and wouldn't mind if there was a bit more off topic chat going on in our Slack/Teams.

cudgy 5y ago
What is the purpose of the tool then? What improvement does it have over email? The main problem that I have with these tools is the increased number of distractions. There is an expectation when using a chat tool that someone will respond promptly, but this rarely is useful for the person that’s receiving the question. For most knowledge workers, frequent distractions come at a very high cost. Notions that we are good at multitasking are completely false. Encouraging the use of these tools is contrary to the goals of deep intelligent work And in fact can encourage poor planning and time management.
- dagw 5y ago
  What improvement does it have over email? One is that everything gets sorted under the right project subheading. Discussions about Project FooBar end up in a different channel than discussions about Project Blork. The second is that I can just post on the Blork channel and know that everybody currently connected to project Blork will see it. Equally if I'm not actively working on FooBar I can easily ignore everything connected to FooBar, and just scan through what's happening every other day or so. I personally feel it's useful keep an eye on what is happening in projects tangentially related to what I'm working on without being CC:d on every project related email sent, and Slack makes that easy. Of course all this can be replicated with mailing lists, email filtering, and decent threading support in your mail client, and perhaps that might even be better, but for whatever reason the tools for easily doing this aren't really being pushed. I'm sure you could build some sort of tools on top of email that gives you most of the benefits of Slack but with a slightly less synchronous feel.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    There were tools called bulletin boards or wikis created decades ago that can accomplish what is described above. All of these chatty tools require discipline by those making posts to not refer to other projects within the silo of the channel. I’ve found this to almost never happen. Email allows for normal conversational encompassing communication method that does not rely upon siloing information about projects into their respective channels. For example, if Blork and FooBar Projects are related In a comment that is made in one of the project channels, it is not easy to navigate their relationships in these tools Without explicitly adding tags to refer to the other channels. All these tags then create a spiderweb of useless links for the most part, and the information flow is weird and difficult to follow in many cases. This model can be advantageous for example when referencing checkins or other tickets within comments of a bug/story reporting system. However, bug reporting systems typically have fewer parties involved in the comments, so things don’t get quite as out of hand.

anoncake 5y ago

Maybe that's why companies use Teams? Because people only use it when they must?