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Unslacking Tideways Company

beberlei.de

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Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#41

Post by vishnu_ks »

cortesoft wrote: post #25
sandGorgon wrote: post #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.

I mean,slack has threads, too.

Yeah. But threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic. This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in conversations.

https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#42

Post by jasode »

>I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...] My ultimate goal is to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work on features, customer support or operational issues.

A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had "ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications when the active window with focus is an IDE like MS Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, emacs, etc. Would that help you?

Basically, it would work similar to Slack's "Do Not Disturb" feature[1]. DND could be expanded beyond "hours" to include a list of apps that shouldn't be interrupted.

Once a programmer switches away from the code IDE to the email program, that's the point the Slack chat notifications would appear. The idea is that programmers already sort of interrupt themselves[2] but since that timing is controlled by the programmer, a Slack notification is less stressful. Thoughts?

>Since work never happens in a vacuum, I would be happy to have only a single realtime notification tool (OpsGenie/PagerDuty) that sends notifications to poeple currently on-call, and only about problems that require realtime attention.

I don't use chat apps at work these days but when I did, I put AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc inside of a virtual machine that was minimized on screen. That way, everybody saw that I was "online" but their notifications were blocked behind the vm instead of making it to my desktop's taskbar. The vm acted like a firewall. I could then look at chat messages on my own schedule at my leisure -- typically once or twice and hour. For workplaces that expect you to reply to chat messages in 5 seconds, this hack won't work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+di...

[2] https://xkcd.com/303/

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#43

Post by beberlei »

dvtrn wrote: post #4

Slack 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 rea…

Author here. Working as the founder mostly alone (or relying on part time freelancers) for a long time I do have control issues that could fuel FOMO.

However how is the "Unread message" status icon, the notifications and e-mails about pings that are sent by default (Yes, you can deactivate them) not an indicator that by default Slack wants you to look into the program as often as possible. Maybe I am using it wrong, but I don't want to fight the defaults of notification overload all the time.

For example on Linux you cant even disable the system tray icon, I wrote a blog post with a hack to do this a few month ago: https://beberlei.de/2017/07/29/hide_slack_unread_and_highlig...

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#44

Post by Kaveren »

goatherders wrote: post #36
Kaveren wrote: post #6

Some 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…

What's wrong with the phone as a real-time communication tool?

1. I can't easily go and look back at everything that was said in a call. Notes are not a replacement for this.

2. Phone calls are too real-time, to the point where you can't manage multiple separate phone calls near the same time or do something else if a phonecall only requires some attention.

Calls have their place, but I don't think they're a replacement for written communication.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#46

Post by beberlei »

jasode wrote: post #42

>I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...] My ultimate goal is to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work on features, customer support or operational issues. A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had "ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications wh…

That is something I always wished Slack had. Enable DND mode and then when you return from it, a way to review a summary of everything what happened. But individual chat messages are hard to aggregate for such a summary.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#47

Post by radus »

sandGorgon wrote: post #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.

Also enjoy Zulip for their very explicit threading system.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#48

Post by beberlei »

anontechworker wrote: post #3

I 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 y…

Author here. I removed this comment after a few re-reads myself, because as you said, I don't actually have a clue about this.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#49

Post by beberlei »

karmelapple wrote: post #2

Hello! One thing I'm curious about, beberlei: is your company colocated, remote, or a mix of the two?

a mix, "nearmote" :-) We all live in the same city, but everyone works remote a few hours or days per week. Also our workdays don't always match (early risers vs night owls).

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#50

Post by dvtrn »

beberlei wrote: post #43
dvtrn wrote: post #4

Slack 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 rea…

Author here. Working as the founder mostly alone (or relying on part time freelancers) for a long time I do have control issues that could fuel FOMO. However how is the "Unread message" status icon, the notifications and e-mails about pings that are sent by default (Yes, you can deactivate them) not an indicator that by default Slack wants you to look into the program as often as possible. Maybe I am using it wrong,…

However how is the "Unread message" status icon, the notifications and e-mails about pings that are sent by default (Yes, you can deactivate them) not an indicator that by default Slack wants you to look into the program as often as possible.

That's a good point, I know the nagging feeling you speak of just looking at my own iPhone and some of the messages that have queued up for my attention.

I'm not sure if there is really a way to reconcile that against our FOMO tendencies that technology seems to only be exacerbating-so I will concede that point but only so much. Yes the technology exacerbates the need to check in and remain accessible even across high latency channels (like distance, time zones, etc), but IMO only in the way that gravity also exacerbates the possibility that you will smash your finger with a hammer when trying to drive a nail.

One can admit that they might smash a finger when trying to drive nails, but they would still reasonably operate the hammer in a way that minimizes smashed fingers while still using the tool for its intended and designed purpose. I propose a similar view for our communication stacks.

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