My understanding: free CI runners for everybody, 10 USD promo code to new users. Considering that DigitalOcean has always been giving away 10 USD coupons to non-users, the promo code is quite irrelevant. But the free CI runners are great!
Curing Our Slack Addiction
41–50 of 187 posts
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#42I'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…
Discord is a bit like Slack but focused on voice chat for the gaming community. It has voice rooms that work as you describe. https://discordapp.com/
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#43Reading 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 c…
> 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.
It' not at all comical. I think the part you don't get is that this is the _main_ reason why most people started trying out slack to start with. People were using chat before slack as well. The reason they tried slack was because of the notifications, alerts, integrations and history. When you get these features, the tool becomes very different from irc and this is what the post is about.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#44This is incredibly timely for me. We have grown from a team of 2 to a team of 18 in the past year, we're all remote and we literally huddle around Slack and warm ourselves to it's glow from morning till night. It's the core of our company culture and our comms.
I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing I'm feeling as a CEO. It's a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as the company scales and you feel like you're always-on from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them at night. I think it's a symptom of a virtual office and team. A real office on the other hand would provide that very real sense of driving home in the evening that gives you a very solid separation from work, the team, the opportunities and the issues.
To be clear: I'll never go back to a physical office, both for my own benefit and that of my team's.
I became aware of this problem with being always-on recently. I also started giving rather short unvarnished answers to questions on Slack and I realized something had changed. I've put it down to having no sense of quiet time. I don't mean not having any 'quiet time' but having no 'sense of quiet time' because someone might have messaged me. So even if I set myself to away, I'm still checking in just in case I dropped the ball because someone is waiting for a reply.
I've changed two things so far to try and fix this:
- Taking long walks (in addition to my regular bike rides) with Slack off. - I still code, so I turn Slack off and set my alarm for 1.5 hours from now or whenever I need to be back on. Then turn Slack off.
Things I'm considering:
- Banning Slack after a certain time at night (for me personally). Perhaps 8pm. - Banning Slack for myself until I'm "on" in the mornings.
Being a remote team I see Slack as absolutely essential and I don't think we could do without it. We are very productive via slack and we share music, jokes, news, ideas for blog posts and many other things via Slack. We also do our voice calls via Slack and we don't use video on purpose because it's distracting. So for us, Slack won't go away any time soon. I think if you can manage it, it's an amazing team platform.
On a broader note: I think digital addiction is a real problem. I think it's subtle and it involves checking the same thing more than 20 times a day in a non-productive obsessive way. Think Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, hitting refresh on a SaaS thing that gives you a quick endorphin or adrenaline rush and of course Slack. I think the symptoms are subtle, the behavior is widely accepted as normal and it's destructive in several ways.
So I think it's important to develop a discipline that allows us to exist online safely, productively and in good health. I think what this discipline is is just beginning to emerge in our culture because the problem of digital addiction and being always-on is only beginning to be recognized.
~mark.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#45I think the key takeaway is this: And even if we had been successful in changing people’s behaviour, the lack of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations about complex subjects anyway. Before you could even fully understand the problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened earlier in…
Wasn't that Google Wave?
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#46Here'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, th…
I disagree. Twitter integration is great because it gives us a way to have tweets about our brand appear and we can discuss each one if needed.
Munin integration via our bot just alerted us to the Linode DDoS today.
We've created our own bot which recognizes bug ID's and expands the bug with title, description and status and a link. Same with support tickets.
Also our bot can draw cows on demand. Very important that.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#47I think the key takeaway is this: And even if we had been successful in changing people’s behaviour, the lack of threading made it very difficult to have meaningful, deep conversations about complex subjects anyway. Before you could even fully understand the problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened earlier in…
Wasn't that Google Wave?
How so?
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#48> And the notifications are to die for. They are simply amazing and fun to receive. This is where the article lost me. How are Slack notifications different from those in other services? I'm just not getting it. To me, this is an example of somebody wanting to love something.
In my experience comparing Slack vs HipChat (limited experience, but still), Slack's notifications were more reliable. As in, Slack was smarter about figuring out when I'd locked my laptop, or the screensaver had activated, and then it would re-route notifications to my phone. It does this pretty flawlessly, compared to HipChat that would mess it up sometimes (and so we were never quite sure whether to trust it).
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#49Reading 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 c…
I think I'll stick with email from now on.
Same here. It's very hard to get actual work done when one is constantly distracted by conversations that can't safely be ignored. Email is bad enough, in that regard.
An old-school analogy comes to mind. People used to BS in common space. But it was just BS. Decisions were made, or at least formalized, in meetings.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#50I have no idea why the answer to this problem is "using Basecamp!" - That doesn't make sense to me at all. For me the answer has been to turn off notifications and shut Slack when I need to go heads down, but review it multiple times a day and chime in where needed. It's still such a vast improvement over an email or email+issues based workflow.
Exactly. I have DND mode configured for between 5 PM and 8 AM. No notifications, unless it's absolutely urgent. Which hasn't happened yet (thankfully!).