I too find it distracting. Sooo, I just left our channels with stupid memes and keep only the ones that provide the information I need to do my job. I don't get how people can complain how distracting it is when your not obligated to stay in those channels. n=1 anecdote, but with my team in four offices on two continents Slack (or Hipchat) is valuable.
Our Week Without Slack
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#22Wait, is Slack now so "mainstream" that it's problematic and the cool thing to do is to get off it?
> "The longest I can go without checking it even if I'm incredibly busy is probably 10-15 minutes."
Well... don't? Maybe close the app?
Our team is 100% remote and we use Slack and email constantly, but when somebody needs to finish some urgent task, we just close it, no big deal. Is having a bit of privacy and piece of mind frowned upon now?
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#23I disagree with the article. Slack is invaluable for my needs as a software engineer. However, none of the people mentioned in the article are software engineers. Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
I'm also in the same field and I find Slack (really chat in general) to be highly distracting. The problem isn't in chat itself, it's that people use it to post non-work related things, gifs, large scale notifications that should really only be sent to one person as a private message, etc. With email, I can filter these things out much easier. But I'm expected to be available on Slack during working hours.
Keep it hidden and only reply to @messages and DMs, you can suppress @channel and @here if you want. If people are still pinging you all the time for inane things then it's sort of a human issue of the sort you might have to deal with if someone keeps coming in your office all the time to chat.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#24Wait, is Slack now so "mainstream" that it's problematic and the cool thing to do is to get off it? > "The longest I can go without checking it even if I'm incredibly busy is probably 10-15 minutes." Well... don't? Maybe close the app? Our team is 100% remote and we use Slack and email constantly, but when somebody needs to finish some urgent task, we just close it, no big deal. Is having a bit of privacy and piece o…
Hey, I'm the guy on the Motherboard team who said this. You make a fair point, but I think the main difference is that we're a team that publishes 20 or so stories every single day. That's 20 individual pieces of content that go from merely an idea to a finished, public product, usually in the course of a couple hours or so for each one. Each one doesn't require input but input is often useful for each of those. We have relatively few long-term projects (we do have them of course, but we don't use slack for those). That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this.
I may be completely off base here, but I'm assuming that most Slack teams probably don't have products whose entire development cycle is only a few hours in many cases. Just my theory, maybe I'm a psycho with a short attention span, but I really don't think that's the case.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#25Our teams are entirely remote, and slack fills in for some of the things we miss by not being in the same room. Async tech conversations, status and reachability, crisis coordination, a feed from various other systems, and some banter. I actually like that the free tier deletes messages; we have other tools (wiki, bug tracker) to serve as a permanent record, so everyone is clear that anything that needs to be documented should be written up elsewhere. If it didn't exist, irc would for us almost fully replace it; it's just a slightly nicer ux.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#26> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn't. Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly…
They're just saying Slack creates an environment that makes it easy to be unproductive. So they made the right decision to not use it rather than force themselves to use up their "discipline energy" and use it properly. It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined. An entirely valid (and correct) approach.
And what of those that don't need to expend "discipline energy" whatever the fuck that is? Slack is not the problem, nor the removal of it the solution. This is corporate bullshit in action.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#27> I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn't. Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly…
They're just saying Slack creates an environment that makes it easy to be unproductive. So they made the right decision to not use it rather than force themselves to use up their "discipline energy" and use it properly. It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined. An entirely valid (and correct) approach.
Yeah, I think this is right (I'm on the Motherboard team), I'm the one who made the "silo" comment. I think Derek's point in the article about Slack making it easy to disguise structural / workflow problems is very true. We don't hate slack and I'm sure we'll go back to using it, but by stripping down to nothing, it made the flaws in our workflow / approach more obvious. Now when we go back to it, hopefully we'll use it in a much different way. Frankly, I hope we don't ever go back or go back in a much scaled down way, but I'm not expecting that long term.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#28From the article: I don't miss it at all, at least not in terms of doing my job well. I miss the memes and the ~banter~. On the other hand, from their picture, it appears that all their people are in the same room. They don't really need an online system for this.
They did mention remote workers. I imagine the need to communicate to everyone in the room and the remoties.
Yeah, we have three people in the UK, two in Canada, and a handful of remote freelancers / contractors. Slack is definitely useful for keeping in touch with them. The question is, how much constant communication do we actually need to put out a day's worth of content? Most of us can work autonomously or with a little one-on-one chatting with our editors, but we were just on Slack because we were trying to create a virtual office that, while nice, probably isn't necessary to actually put out a product.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since IRC was available for the last 15 years and only a handful of people used it like you, we should conclude that about the same number would do the same with Slack, all the others are just people who shouldn't be using Slack at all.
IRC dates back to 1989. I myself first compiled a client on a HP-UX 9 system and connected in 1993. IRC was relatively big because it preceded the web; it was one of the few cool, interactive things you could do over the network. That and some early networked games. MUDs, shooters like Hunt (1986), XPilots (1992?)
Even before IRC there was "talk" which let you chat with anyone logged in to the same host (don't recall if it supported network chat). Remember in those days few people had a computer on their desk, instead they had a terminal that connected to a central host.
Re: Our Week Without Slack
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC dates back to 1989. I myself first compiled a client on a HP-UX 9 system and connected in 1993. IRC was relatively big because it preceded the web; it was one of the few cool, interactive things you could do over the network. That and some early networked games. MUDs, shooters like Hunt (1986), XPilots (1992?)
Even before IRC there was "talk" which let you chat with anyone logged in to the same host (don't recall if it supported network chat). Remember in those days few people had a computer on their desk, instead they had a terminal that connected to a central host.
Yes talk did work over the network. The programmers that wrote it, though, made fundamental mistakes in it. They sent raw C structures over the network without marshaling, oops! So talk didn't work very well. The issues were addresses in "ntalk".