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The most useful thing about Slack is you can press Shift+ESC (sometimes you have to press it twice) to mark all conversations as read. Inbox zero with two keystrokes. Whoever implemented that, I'd like to buy a coffee someday. (Also, I discovered this because I use Ctrl+Shift+ESC instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Windows Task Manager immediately without going through the intermediary screen that pops up, and on…
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Not sure why you're getting downvotes - it's a reasonable question to ask: "why use something that makes you crazy / stressed out? Not to set up a straw-man, but I'd imagine a similar reaction if someone wrote a post titled "How to use Facebook and not get depressed," the gut-reaction is "why use it if it's making you feel bad?"
A good question. The most powerful answer (for both examples) is because other-people-using-it makes its use by you necessary to get things done.
If it had use then it wouldnt make people "crazy". It would make them happy. This inherently leads me to believe it has no use.
Personal experience, there is no golden rule to these things. Email , slack , google calendar. You eventually need to build your own relationship with these things and be adult enough to maintain that relationship (inbox at 0), seperate it from your emotions and be prepared to toss it to the side for in person conversation.
Its not slack that is making people crazy its the policies of using it at the company (or usually the lack there of) that make its benefit inconsistent. But it seems slack has not improved the situation but only exacerbated it.
Before the contract, there were a lot of teams/departments using Slack, so naturally an assortment of team workspaces started to accrue.
Once the enterprise contract came into place, those workspaces were integrated under one company banner so you can sign up with one login and join any company 'workspace'.
This means that if you need to talk to a team in a different workspace, you have to open a new tab in your browser and then join that. This is annoying, and is even worse when 'global' channels were introduced, because ANY notification gets broadcast across all the workspaces you have open.
Even DMs, if someone DMs me my Firefox tab bar lights up red across 5 different tabs.
This is partly an organisational problem in the company, but I think Slack should take some of the blame too to reduce these niggles
In two companies where we had piloted Slack, I led successful campaigns to transition away from it. Combining your choice of Email / IM client (Gmail / Hangouts or Outlook / Skype) satisfies 99% of use cases for Slack. Overall we were less stressed and didn't miss a beat. I'm sure there are industries / companies working in areas that it makes sense - but I don't think it just works for everyone by default in the sam…
At Missive, we offer a hybrid approach that merges the silos of both external and internal communication back into one app. https://missiveapp.com/slack-vs-missive (detailed post, with meat) As foreign as chat is to email, mixing them unleashes unforeseen possibilities, like directly referencing customer emails in dev chat conversations discussing feature implementation. Making collaboration between email heavy teams…
Here's an exercise. You and your coworker discussed plans for a project in a large channel 3 weeks ago. You need to get all that information and give it to someone else. How do you do it? You can't. It will be interspersed with a bunch of other nonsense from other people and isn't grouped or organized in any sane manner.
This whole "chat" in workplace thing does nothing to actually get work done.
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Slack is the epicenter of all manner of communication problems where I work, and sadly, we have not yet figured out how to solve the problems. We have no remote employees, yet the 30 of us, who all sit right near each other, spend all day Slacking. I believe about 85% of messages are Direct Messages. It's extremely frustrating.
This x 1000. I constantly remind my team to favor face to face communication where possible. We have peopl hipchat each other sometimes literally sitting across the desk from each other. It creates such a frustrating "i spend half my day in chat" culture i just cant imagine the productivity drain.
I understand your preference for face-to-face but one reason some prefer text chat is to minimize the ambient noise level in the office so as to not disturb others.
For me, one problem with face-to-face (and voice calls) is I often end up having to take notes and transcribe what the person is saying to me. Instead, if you just send me a text chat or email, it saves me the step of being your secretary to type in what you just told me.
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Reliable message delivery, reliable history and history search.
can't you history search through outlook under the 'conversation history' folder? (or click the 'see more in outlook' hyperlink on skype.) Although yes, it's not built in to the skype app UI itself. And that would be nice.
No one should be using slack at all. I understand that it fills use cases that email and irc don’t, but that is no excuse for letting all of your communications be owned by some other company. What if slack accidentally or deliberately denies access to your data? What if they choose to use it for their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? What if they get hacked by Russia?
I appreciate the sentiment, but Slack has a privacy policy and a known system for how they make money (they charge customers). Companies don’t just, on a whim, decide to start giving away data, especially when they know that it’s valuable and they have a business model of trust. Slack has this. So does basically every other corporate geared SaaS.
Being worried about data security is a real problem. That’s understandable. But companies don’t just “decide” how to use data on a whim — it’s a business after all. When you pay for a product, that direct monetary exchange is the one that firmly identifies who the product is — and it’s not you.
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A good question. The most powerful answer (for both examples) is because other-people-using-it makes its use by you necessary to get things done.
and thats where my quesiton is not for the employees but for the employers. Why are you choosing to use a product in your company that has no use. If it had use then it wouldnt make people "crazy". It would make them happy. This inherently leads me to believe it has no use. Personal experience, there is no golden rule to these things. Email , slack , google calendar. You eventually need to build your own relationship…