Just throwing out there but has Slack genuinely improved the work lives of anybody? I've used it for my past two jobs and have yet to find a way of using it that doesn't destroy my productivity or make me genuinely afraid of receiving a message and being thrown off what I was doing.
Yes. Working in a fully distributed team, irc+pictures is great.
It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.
Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it.
I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit.
And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wavy reason, and continue to complain.
Maybe because when you disable notifications you still get the god damned red dot/badge thing. They make it very hard to find out where to disable that.
Absolutely. It’s allowed my 10 second questions to take 10 seconds, instead of 10 seconds of talking after 10 (non-contiguous) minutes of trying to guess when the person will be at their desk.
I definitely don’t feel pressure to answer Slack messages when I’m actively working on something, though. I imagine it’d be pretty bad if we had that kind of environment.
Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.
Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
> Maybe no more than any other chat application (Slack has been the nicest of those which we have tried though), but my workplace, which was born around office messaging, has recently started to push towards more voice communication and I feel like that has brought a decrease in productivity.
> Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
> But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard. If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
> Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard.
Where I find the opposite. The ability to stop and craft a message that is precise gets the job done immediately, rather than the continual back and forth to confirm that each party understands what happens to be uttered in the moment that is inherit to voice chat.
> If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
A personal one shared by everyone, I guess. Meeting length and frequency has increased substantially. And not only the meetings that I personally take part in, but observed company-wide.
I imagine familiarity is key. If you come from an environment where voice communication is the de facto method, you are going to get good at that style of communication through practice, and then anything else is going to seem less performant. In my case, we spent many years conducting textual communication and gained plenty of practice at it. Now, voice communication is the unfamiliar ground.
Here's a small tip for others that might help this problem:
Don't use the application versions of any of your apps. Instead, open up the web version of all of them and keep all their tabs in one browser window.
For example, my "notification window" includes my gmail, slack, outlook, and the web client for my mobile texts. I keep the window minimized until I have a need for it, and keep the vibration off on my phone during work hours.
Oh, yes. 100%. I can't imagine how we would work in the last two major companies I worked at without it. Everyone is on slack, great place to ask simple questions, create a channel to discuss an issue, add images and video, and provide feedback when you are ready.
Yeah it's a total hog of attention. At the company I just left, you could walk through our office and 90% of people were just talking on Slack. What a waste of engineering time.
We were pretty invested in ChatOps which I thought was great. Being able to issue commands in any sort of war room situation with a group of people was definitely helpful for that sort of triaging. Of course, the downside being that depending on Slack to be up to do effective operations isn't super appealing to me.
Of course people have been doing this with IRC forever, but Slack is a definite improvement on this front over Skype.
Not specific to Slack (we use MS teams) but the concept of a channel/group/team is great for white noise comms, these types of comms are going to happen (e.g happy birthday) and if it reduces email load (which means the email channel can then be kept for higher priority comms and record keeping especially for later searching), it’s a good thing IMO.
Having broken things sent a webhook to an #alerts channel is so very excellent. Various channels for home and work and they have been great. I’m sure there are better tools out there, but this has really changed things for the better for me.
We're a small team of a bit more than 10 people and slack has definitely improved our lifes.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are equally bad.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
Yes. I really like it. Since roughly 1998, I've done work chat on IRC, hipchat, MOOs, and a web-based chat app I built with a friend. Slack is the best of any of them.
Honestly I feel the same way about email. I work in an office culture where rapid email replies are strongly encouraged. But as a project-based worker, that kills my momentum. I've generally gotten away with semi-ignoring it by checking email morning, mid-day, end of day, and strongly encouraging people to call me in the interim with anything truly urgent.
Don't forget, it is YOUR choice to have Slack open. Nobody is forcing you to. It might be an unspoken rule to do so, but I value productivity more. In the event someone has something important to say (rarely the case), come up or call me (or PM me on IRC).
Anecdotal but most companies I’ve worked with that use Slack,
1. Don’t give devs company phones (and no one should ring my personal cell)
2. Have remote people they communicate with frequently (ask the remote people how slack has included/enabled them more than ever)
3. Only use email for non-urgent, one-way, or external messaging (although bringing high-value 3rd parties into Slack has been great in my experience)
No matter your concerns about Slack, once you’re in a company using it you have no choice but to embed yourself completely.
Set standards on when people use the group notifications is a start. But in general just having standards that people agree upon for channel message priority is the way to go.
