one day in our office slack was down from like 11:50am to 1:10 pm and it was perfect. It was like a big sign lit up in the office that said "TALK TO PEOPLE". Everyone took a much needed slack break and got lunch. Maybe the admin of a slack network should be able to enable that timeframe to be off everyday.
Curing Our Slack Addiction
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Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#22I can imagine this same article being written many years ago when email first became ubiquitous in the workplace. I worked at a large company where seemingly every day we would get several "someone has left the lights on in their blue Honda" type emails sent to everyone in the company. Thankfully now I work in a small one without a carpark.
I appreciate the idea of resolving a communication issue by removing a parking structure and, if that doesn't work, removing the rest of the company.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#23Interesting read, will have to see how it turned out (in case you guys move back to Slack :D). Although, I'm not sure changing tools is the right answer, it sounds like you guys had everything you wanted and more. Why not modify Slack to your liking and not change tools entirely, this eliminates the need to learn a whole new set of tools to do the same work.
I think the point is to completely go cold turkey with the tool they know is good and tackle the problem with something they are unfamiliar with, disrupting existing habits. It sounds like they reached the point where modifying Slack (or more importantly, their communication habits) would just result in sliding back to the old ways.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#24I'm wondering if Slack will ever implement something like Sococo or teamspeak's always-on voice chat. If you have not seen these it's quite a weird idea. If you are in the channel your speakers are always-on. Someone can speak to you without dialing and without you answering. They can simply say "Hey Fred..." and start talking. I have not worked with these, but did try Sococo briefly. The way this would work in slack…
I've used TeamSpeak for that at an old job. We used it for pairing and team meetings. We couldn't all fit in the office at the same time (10 people, 100 square feet w/desks wasn't happening), so we had team meetings over TS. Was great. Would definitely do it again.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#25Chat is toxic to productivity. Teams need to get questions answered 'eventually' (exactly when depends on the team) without interrupting each other.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#26You have to think of slack channels as coworking place and meeting rooms. You need to live mainly in one channel (the equivalent of the physical open office), and go to the other channels when called in, or when you have a bit of down time to check what's going on there. Like the buildings where we used to work, you do not need to visit every room.
I guess the hard part is the self policing the author mentioned. At my employer we are having the same situation. Some ppl are at the point they check Slack 3 times a day, come in, lunch, before end of day.
I am guessing you are not in a distributed (remote staff) company?
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#27[deleted]
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#28Reading this article was honestly sickening.
As I went on I got a growing sense of something horribly wrong with the author/culture of the company. And then these paragraphs all out confirmed my suspicions:
> Slack forced me to evaluate things very fast and respond quickly, otherwise I would miss my opportunity to join a conversation before it moved onto something else.
> Then there was the fact that we had so many channels and direct messages and group chats. It multiplexed my brain and left me in a constant state of anxiety, feeling that I needed to always be on guard.
> And I had to read everything. I felt that I had no choice as often decisions would be made in Slack that I needed to know. And in other ways it was simply an addiction that needed to be fed.
Blaming the tool for this kind of behavior would be comical but for the fact that it's actually scary scary to see someone with this little self awareness. At least he got the "addiction" part right.
Reality check. My company of ~80 people uses Slack (sparingly) as a slightly better alternative to gchat/Skype. We have jira for issues and a wiki for persistent knowledge. No one here likes being interrupted or always being on guard for the next chance to participate in a conversation. So we just don't do it and Slack has yet to force us to.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#29Here's my best practices list:
1. The best use of slack is the free edition which has limited history. Once this lack of history is made clear, people use it simply for online pings. Since notes, files and everything will disappear, people will automatically put the effort to put those things in the right tools (wiki, bug tracker etc).
2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment.
3. Integrations.. are a gimmick. There is really no value in knowing someone commented on some github issue instantly. Or someone committed something. Use integrations only for firefighting. But because of 2) use this carefull because you shouldn't expect anyone to be around. Paging/sms/email is best for this. After all, these are already used and it's not slack makes these obsolete.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#30Wow really surprised to hear they broke up with Slack. It seemed like a very good long explanation of the problem, basically no mention of any attempt to fix the problem, and then dropping the tool. We are deep into Slack and still liking it, but seeing some strain. This really rings true: "some of the most positive and uplifting individuals I know come off as curt and stressed and pissed off in Slack conversations."
tht makes no sense, every1 i kno is rlly good at xpressing their emotions in txt For real though, it's amazing what core parts of human interaction people will try to replace with an app. People need to understand what they're really giving up with face-to-face or verbal communication.. thousands of years of highly developed body language, tone, etc.
I think the solution is a mix. Slack + some video solution seems like it could work. The tools are there and it looks like Slack is quickly building a video tool. Right now, small teams can get by well with Slack and Hangouts.