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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 distra

by 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.
  - dagw 5y ago
    There were tools called bulletin boards or wikis created decades ago that can accomplish what is described above. Far be it for me to defend Teams, but one thing it does kind of right is to automatically create a wiki, a project tracking and a file share page in addition to the chat space for each project so that you can, if you want, use the right tool for the job. That being said I worked at places a decade ago that tried to do the internal bulletin and wiki thing for their projects, and for whatever reason, it never worked anywhere near as well as I've seen Slack work. So while I agree in theory with many of the complaint levied against Slack as a productivity tool, in practice I've yet to see anything work better. But it is also clear that, for whatever reason, I haven't experience many of the time wasting antics that other people seem to be describing.

by cudgy 5y ago

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.
- dagw 5y ago
  There were tools called bulletin boards or wikis created decades ago that can accomplish what is described above. Far be it for me to defend Teams, but one thing it does kind of right is to automatically create a wiki, a project tracking and a file share page in addition to the chat space for each project so that you can, if you want, use the right tool for the job. That being said I worked at places a decade ago that tried to do the internal bulletin and wiki thing for their projects, and for whatever reason, it never worked anywhere near as well as I've seen Slack work. So while I agree in theory with many of the complaint levied against Slack as a productivity tool, in practice I've yet to see anything work better. But it is also clear that, for whatever reason, I haven't experience many of the time wasting antics that other people seem to be describing.