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> I have to keep notifications on and triage them Nope. Read the whole comment, i address that :) Some people said "fine, then I'm turning off notifications"

> I have to keep notifications on and triage them Nope. Read the whole comment, i address that :) Some people said "fine, then I'm turning off notifications" and I'm fine with that, if I have an alternate method of contact for the (very rare) production outages.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago
Understood. The expectations of your job/team (emergencies etc) are probably just different from what I'm used to. Seems like a good system for your team so I'm glad it works for you.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  It was not easily understood or developed. My approach to many of these things is a direct result of me doing it very badly at some point and having to deal with the consequences of it.
steveBK123 4y ago
I hate to say email, but I feel like the venue for not time sensitive messages is.. email. I had this dynamic at my last gig with very pushy users, spamming of @here/@channel, and a boss working weird hours. I found no solution other than disabling all notifications for slack. Still, when I would wake up & quickly scan through slack to make sure there were no open fires to login & help with, I would invariably have to dig through commingled fires & "just sending this now cuz I'm online" threads. My next solution became that I just stopped even checking slack at all in the morning until I was either in-office, or ready to login while remote. Otherwise I found myself stewing about some annoying but non-urgent messages that I had exposed myself to. Most people would prefer to get 1 properly thought out email than to wake up to a series of 5-10 slack messages or slack wall of text. If I want to go back to an email, I can leave the individual message unread. A slack message I end up with a red dot next to my bosses name for an unread message (and obscures any more messages that have come since) OR use the "remind me" feature to them get a red dot popping up next to my bosses name in an hour to make me jump thinking my boss has some new urgent thing to ask me. We've invented a pretty good async non-urgent message medium, and yet forgotten how to use it. I think all of these super clever DM strategies are self defeating.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  I don't like email. Keep in mind my workflow is much more likely to result in you ending up in a new task focused group or with a new message in a group vs a 1:1 DM.
  - efdee 4y ago
    This pretty much demonstrates the problem most people have with your approach: it isn't about you - it's about the wellbeing of the people you work with. Also, 'just turn off notifications' isn't a solution. Having to ignore messages from your superior puts people in a very uncomfortable position. Granted I know very little about you other than the tiny bits of information gathered in this post, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've worked with people exhibiting similar attitudes and it is extremely toxic.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Yup. "just ignore your boss" is usually considered a CLM (Career Limiting Move)
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yes, and being on the receiving end of that behavior, I hate it. And in slack it is very hard to manage other than turning off all notifications and just shrugging your shoulders. I can't mark individual messages for followup easily, so I have to leave entire DMs/groups/channels unread.. missing subsequent messages. I end up in 50 different channels, 30 different DM groups and 20 1:1 DMs over the course of a week. Some conversations span 5 different channels/DMs as people are added/removed.. Outlook would just have one nice threaded email on the subject. Slack I end up with 5 little red dots on my channel browser pane.. it's a mess. I've now had to institute a policy for myself on escalations that is - if it doesn't come through PagerDuty, it's not an incident or urgent. This in theory, by official policy is correct. In practice, this is like a union slowing down the trains..
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    OK one more! Beyond out of hours.. A huge huge problem with slack versus email is out-of-office behaviors. In outlook, I set myself OOO in calendar, create a scheduled OOO response with active dates and audience types to respond / not respond to (internal/external). It's like 3 clicks, and defaults to the same message I always use, and I have to set myself OOO in calendar already anyway so people don't book meetings / my boss knows I am out. In Slack, I mark myself away, set my status to OOO, put a stupid little palm try icon up, disable notifications and... AND I still get people blasting me with DMs as if I am working. I come back to a mess of unreads I need a couple hours to unwind as I scroll up channels/DMs/etc. Users can even force notifications through against my will (except that I disabled them at OS level :-) ). Slack needs an OOO response tool, and even the ability to block senders to go a step further.
nicoburns 4y ago
Yeah, I have both Slack and Email notifications off out of hours, but people who might need me have my phone number on the trust that they only use it in emergencies. And automated production outage notifications get sent via SMS in addition to other channels (we have very few outages so this ends up being low noise)

texaslonghorn5 4y ago

Understood. The expectations of your job/team (emergencies etc) are probably just different from what I'm used to. Seems like a good system for your team so I'm glad it works for you.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
It was not easily understood or developed. My approach to many of these things is a direct result of me doing it very badly at some point and having to deal with the consequences of it.

steveBK123 4y ago

I hate to say email, but I feel like the venue for not time sensitive messages is.. email. I had this dynamic at my last gig with very pushy users, spamming of @here/@channel, and a boss working weird hours. I found no solution other than disabling all notifications for slack. Still, when I would wake up & quickly scan through slack to make sure there were no open fires to login & help with, I would invariably have to dig through commingled fires & "just sending this now cuz I'm online" threads. My next solution became that I just stopped even checking slack at all in the morning until I was either in-office, or ready to login while remote. Otherwise I found myself stewing about some annoying but non-urgent messages that I had exposed myself to. Most people would prefer to get 1 properly thought out email than to wake up to a series of 5-10 slack messages or slack wall of text. If I want to go back to an email, I can leave the individual message unread. A slack message I end up with a red dot next to my bosses name for an unread message (and obscures any more messages that have come since) OR use the "remind me" feature to them get a red dot popping up next to my bosses name in an hour to make me jump thinking my boss has some new urgent thing to ask me. We've invented a pretty good async non-urgent message medium, and yet forgotten how to use it. I think all of these super clever DM strategies are self defeating.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
I don't like email. Keep in mind my workflow is much more likely to result in you ending up in a new task focused group or with a new message in a group vs a 1:1 DM.
- efdee 4y ago
  This pretty much demonstrates the problem most people have with your approach: it isn't about you - it's about the wellbeing of the people you work with. Also, 'just turn off notifications' isn't a solution. Having to ignore messages from your superior puts people in a very uncomfortable position. Granted I know very little about you other than the tiny bits of information gathered in this post, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've worked with people exhibiting similar attitudes and it is extremely toxic.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yup. "just ignore your boss" is usually considered a CLM (Career Limiting Move)
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yes, and being on the receiving end of that behavior, I hate it. And in slack it is very hard to manage other than turning off all notifications and just shrugging your shoulders. I can't mark individual messages for followup easily, so I have to leave entire DMs/groups/channels unread.. missing subsequent messages. I end up in 50 different channels, 30 different DM groups and 20 1:1 DMs over the course of a week. Some conversations span 5 different channels/DMs as people are added/removed.. Outlook would just have one nice threaded email on the subject. Slack I end up with 5 little red dots on my channel browser pane.. it's a mess. I've now had to institute a policy for myself on escalations that is - if it doesn't come through PagerDuty, it's not an incident or urgent. This in theory, by official policy is correct. In practice, this is like a union slowing down the trains..
- steveBK123 4y ago
  OK one more! Beyond out of hours.. A huge huge problem with slack versus email is out-of-office behaviors. In outlook, I set myself OOO in calendar, create a scheduled OOO response with active dates and audience types to respond / not respond to (internal/external). It's like 3 clicks, and defaults to the same message I always use, and I have to set myself OOO in calendar already anyway so people don't book meetings / my boss knows I am out. In Slack, I mark myself away, set my status to OOO, put a stupid little palm try icon up, disable notifications and... AND I still get people blasting me with DMs as if I am working. I come back to a mess of unreads I need a couple hours to unwind as I scroll up channels/DMs/etc. Users can even force notifications through against my will (except that I disabled them at OS level :-) ). Slack needs an OOO response tool, and even the ability to block senders to go a step further.

nicoburns 4y ago

Yeah, I have both Slack and Email notifications off out of hours, but people who might need me have my phone number on the trust that they only use it in emergencies. And automated production outage notifications get sent via SMS in addition to other channels (we have very few outages so this ends up being low noise)