Unslacking Tideways Company
beberlei.de
Unslacking Tideways Company
1–10 of 162 posts
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#2Hello! One thing I'm curious about, beberlei: is your company colocated, remote, or a mix of the two?
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#3I can understand the frustration with Slack but the comment about large companies using it doesn’t have much ground. I’m at a 3000+ employee company and slack works great for us. I think that one thing that has helped many people is to remember that you never have to reply immediately. Also, if you’re a stakeholder on something, then a final decision should not be made without your input. I’m sure that if you limit yourself to checking slack as much as you check your email, then it won’t be such an issue.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#4Slack makes this very difficult and at least for me, is a primary cause of anxiety and fear of missing out
I unironically wonder how widespread this problem is among the specific group of people who blame their lack of productivity on Slack, or failing that, how many people would admit their FOMO is enhanced by chat apps.
So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't really issues with slack, but human issues with boundaries of what we allow to take our attention not being defined, and ultimately, yes: FOMO. Things are going to get missed, you're going to come in late to certain conversations, but I often wonder do you need to be on the bleeding edge of these talks if they don't directly relate to you or even reside in the periphery of your responsibility radius?
Probably not, I would wager-but tl;dr very rarely does it seem like Slack is the cause of productivity problems, it just seems the convenient scapegoat. Especially since:
"work never happens in a vacuum" (FTA) is a statement that in my opinion, cuts both ways.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#5When I was at a fully local company, slack was good for conversations where a few people might be actively discussing an issue and then I could come in hours later and skim the history, if it was a channel I felt relevant to be aware of.
But slack was also super easy to use wrongly and drain so much time into. It really helped to declare slack a lossy source of comms. You shall not expect people to read it and you shall not use it as a data store. Important things go into email, wiki, tickets.
On a fully remote team, slack is so important, but all the same rules need to apply.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#6Some form of communication that's reasonable to be real-time is important. Slack is one of the better options for this.
It makes much more sense to change the expectations / culture surrounding Slack usage at a company than to drop it outright.
You can use Slack and related applications for asynchronous communication in direct messages. On the other hand, I don't want to have to wait multiple hours for a reply when I only need a quick clarification in regards to a previous e-mail.
I don't want to waste my time with e-mail, and I don't think it's a better alternative.
There is real value in Slack and programs like it, and you give that up when you only use e-mail and GitHub issues and such. This is better if you have no one working remote, but it's far from ideal. Besides, if I had an office job I could ignore Slack messages. I couldn't ignore someone walking up and interrupting me in-person.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#7Definitely agree with your decision.
After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased.
No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger).
However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.slack.com where many hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware project. Slack is easily accessible for anyone to ask questions and with proper use, I was pretty productive in communicating effectively across channels.
Despite this, I believe that slack in general is a waste of time in a TEAM. Why not have meetings or meet up in real life rather than hiding behind a screen without any physical interaction? Slack, however, is a great alternative for forums since there is great searching capabilities within channels and there's always someone there to help.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#8Good luck finding out about free food in the office without Slack.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#9>If you wait for a long time to reply to a message on chat, then the discussion thread is already spread in the history of the chat room and messages back and forth interleaved with many additional messages that are not related is not helpful.
Use zulip - https://zulipchat.com . Opensource. Designed for threaded context.
Re: Unslacking Tideways Company
#10If only Slack was the only source of interruptions!
The more responsibility you gain, the more interruptions you get. I have to make a conscious effort to ignore people for a few hours in order to get into a "flow" these days.
This can lead to some friction but I can't think of another way around the problem.