Coincidentally, I was just listening a podcast episode with the creator of Level (https://level.app/), which was built to fix exactly all these issues mentioned in the article. I agree 100% with this - the culture of ASAP and the FOMO that's created if you're not always on Slack, prevents one from doing deep, meaningful work. I'm really looking forward to trying out Level.
Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
31–40 of 227 posts
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#32Reminds me of this Knuth quote, "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Source: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
To me, this can be taken as an argument against the post's premise. Could there be any e-communication tool more asynchronous than email? (Except for notifications, which you can turn off). I am not blaming Knuth, he must really dislike distraction of any sort. However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period, I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk t…
There are a variety of communication methods:- Email
- Face to face
- Phone call
- Text message
- Slack
- Publication/memo
The rank corresponds to distraction, synchronicity, time to compose/respond, latency, and importance. Done well, Slack is a nice layer between a 10-minute email that might be forwarded on to some customer, and an "OK for demo Monday?" text message. You can include screenshots, links, spreadsheets, etc.
The problem seems to come up when it's assumed to be lower-latency and higher-priority than it is. I can take a 30-minute break every couple hours and answer a couple emails and a half dozen Slack pings, or you can interrupt me with a phone call or text that I can ignore or take and subsequently answer a quick Slack query, or you can come to my desk and bring something to my attention right now. If you think Slack is like talking to me or calling to me (or treat it like it has that real-time priority) you're going to have a significant new distraction.
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#33how about no notifications for messages unless the sender specifically says "send notification"?
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#34For myself, Slack is such a time waster that I'm at the point where I only check on it periodically. I tell coworkers that if there's an emergency that needs to be tended to right away, just text, call, or talk to me in person. If there's something that can wait, email is better. After 2+ years of using Slack on several different teams, I have yet to see any enhanced group communications. I do however see massive amo…
My experience exactly. The most common observation with Slack is how people praise it as the next big thing in productivity. But this is always during the honeymoon phase, after a few months of working with Slack it usually quickly wears off.
I think the worst part of it (as the article mentions) is that it feels like you are doing something productive when you're using Slack, but the majority of time you're actually not. You're generating conversations, notifications, and in general producing tangible output that for me is subconsciously gratifying. That hooks me in to using the service even though consciously I know that I'm not getting real work done.
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#35I'm wondering if team size is what makes slack such a pain for many posters. Slack is great for my 8 person remote company. I keep notifications off for channels that aren't directly related to my development responsibilities, but I value having access to them for review at the end of the day so I'm aware of what is happening elsewhere. If I need a long stretch of uninterrupted development time, I turn on Do Not Disturb and everyone knows not to override this unless there is an emergency.
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#36I have to minimize Slack throughout the day in order to get work done, and I try to only pay attention to it when I hear the alert noise when someone @'s me, which unfortunately I mis-hear all the time. My brain thinks it hears that alert noise beneath the music I have playing, or if I go to the other room it thinks it hears it from afar, so I run back to my desk to see if someone is messaging me. I hate that I have…
Is it feasible for you to disable notifications?
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience exactly. The most common observation with Slack is how people praise it as the next big thing in productivity. But this is always during the honeymoon phase, after a few months of working with Slack it usually quickly wears off.
I think the worst part of it (as the article mentions) is that it feels like you are doing something productive when you're using Slack, but the majority of time you're actually not. You're generating conversations, notifications, and in general producing tangible output that for me is subconsciously gratifying. That hooks me in to using the service even though consciously I know that I'm not getting real work done.
The benefit I've found is in cross-team communication.
Specifically of the "I need to reach out to this team I don't know about their product" variety.
A) If they interact with Slack, I can search previous answers
B) It promotes a culture of openness. Huge benefit in some orgs! We talk about our projects, warts and all, in public channels. If all your org channels are private, you're definitely Doing It Wrong
C) It's far more scalable than ticketing. Issues can be resolved in three lines of text, rather than ticket creation, queue, assignment, closing, etc.
As an above commenter noted though, you can and should push back on expectations of constant availability. Slack is asynchronous, not for initiating hi-pri issues.
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#38Neither is Hacker News.
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#39Reminds me of this Knuth quote, "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things." Source: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
To me, this can be taken as an argument against the post's premise. Could there be any e-communication tool more asynchronous than email? (Except for notifications, which you can turn off). I am not blaming Knuth, he must really dislike distraction of any sort. However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period, I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk t…
> However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period ...
Perhaps I am (really) old, but pre slack is a blink of an eye ago.
Also we are, sadly, not yet post-Slack.
> ... I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my desk to ask the question (vastly more distracting). We had meetings for tiny questions and they stretched far too long. The culture of company that is far more responsible than any single tool.
You're describing a work environment that bewildering appears to exclude email, or the option to explain to people how and when to use email.
Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens
#40Disclaimer: I work for Webex Teams, another collab tool.
I think a lot of this depends a lot more on the expectations of the whole group. This needs to be defined at an org level and well understood by everyone. It's not so much the tool as how it's used.
There is now a continuum of interactions:
- FYIs that are put out in a topical chat. You get to those when you have a moment, when you go through your unread rooms to catch up. Same for topics that you are only peripherally following. Time is not of the essence there. Zero interruption here and no expectation for you to be always listening.
- Topical chats where you are @-mentionned. This is where a conversation that you're not actively following suddenly took a turn where your input is sollicited. But since you see the topic of the room, you are in control about whether it's worth an interruption. The group's expectation is that the person that was mentionned will join the conversation IF they are not in the middle of something (assuming the topic is not alarmist).
- New rooms that got created around a topic or you getting added to an existing room. Basically it's similar to the above, where you're getting dragged into a conversation.
- 1:1 chats with specific requests. Again, it depends who it's from, you triage based on origin. But the expectation is already managed at our group level.
In all these modes, you can chose to accept the interruption or defer it. The deeper your work, the more likely you can defer it. We can operate like this because we have the nuclear option we can always use when it's actually needed: PagerDuty. This brings a few benefits: the person paging a team or another individual is aware that they are putting a burden of urgency and there's a recorded audit log of that page. So it's not used lightly.
Once you've accepted the interruption though, you still get to control its modality.
- Very often, a "hey, quick question" can turn into something WAY larger than the requester could imagine. That's when we point them to creating a Jira ticket, effectively punting a synchronous interruption into an asynchronous unit of work. Or you can tell the requester to schedule a meeting to work more deeply on that. (Related topic: ALWAYS have at least one day where it is forbidden to schedule meetings, accros the whole org.)
- If the request is about an urgent matter, we just do an instant video meeting within Webex Teams. That converts long drawn out chats into quick visual meetings where the nuances are better expressed. Because in a long chat, the mind is already interrupted, so having to wait for typing and confirming nuance ends up taking a lot of time.