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Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

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Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#121

Post by res0nat0r »

fs2 wrote: post #22
rjdagost wrote: post #18

For 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.

People keep wanting to blame Slack for this problem, but it really is the folks you're working with who are the issue.

Slack is getting such a huge valuation so quickly because it is incredibly simple to use and is very user friendly. IM tools like Skype / Sametime / whatever have been around for companies forever, but Slack is much more user friendly and frictionless to use from the ground up, and with plugins even more useful.

I think most of the hate here keeps coming back to issues with peoples coworkers, not whatever IM platform they want to dislike that is currently making tons of cash.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#122

Post by rjsw »

frgotmylogin wrote: post #89
StavrosK wrote: post #84

For a bit of context for the following, I've been working remote for years, five years in my previous company and one in the current one. The previous company did not use Slack. We used XMPP for one-on-one IMing (we did have chat rooms but nobody used them), physical desk phones for meetings or high-bandwidth chats, and email for everything else. The current company uses Slack and Zoom for meetings. There's a big dif…

I've found that a good way to lower the hassle on starting a zoom is to create a permanently open meeting with your phone number as the meeting ID. Then it is as simple as pasting/typing a link into an IM conversation and clicking it, and if you aren't at your own machine, it's easy to just type it. My only complaint with zoom is the lack of a prompt before launching video. I, and most of my coworkers, have uninstall…

I use Zoom for a project, I don't start calls myself but there seems to be an option to have video disabled by default.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#123

Post by swozey »

Slack makes me miss Discord. Slack has taken a hard stance on how company culture should dictate it's use and doesn't give you the options to customize it away from their own viewpoint at all. I use Slack on a massive 40k person server (and probably 10 other servers) and it's absolutely terrible in this environment, as a non-admin you have no self support mechanisms (blocking DMs, muting users, etc). I really wish FOSS projects would stop using Slack, if the community grows to be large it's untenable and requires a ton of moderation time. I don't really want to go back to IRC but Slack isn't a good solution for them. There are so many options and features they could add that could be controlled by admins but they refuse to add them.

(https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=e...)

* You can sort channels and even put them into folders (Engineering, HR) * You can choose who to accept DMs from * You can block/mute users

There's probably a ton of other things I'm not aware of. I rarely use Discord, but every time that I do I leave wishing companies I worked at used that instead.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#124

Post by skohan »

icedchai wrote: post #102
mikewhy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So search multiple places instead of just the one?

If you use a Wiki for everything, no. However, that is unlikely. You'll have to search more than one place anyway. Making Slack your primary store of institutional knowledge is unwise. Chats are full of garbage, random discussions, old / bad decisions, etc.

And there's no guarantee that slack will exist forever.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#125

Post by klibertp »

neilv wrote: post #47
rjdagost wrote: post #18

For 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…

Ugh. I have an anecdote in which I was brought in by a great niche technical contracting firm, as a developer who was also supposed to repair a client relationship, after a previous developer quit. I learned that the problem on client site was not quite what was expected (they already knew the client's manager didn't want contractors). It turned out that a significant part the problem on the ground was simply that th…

> that the contracting company's on-site manager was bombarding the contractors with instant messages they were required to monitor

Pardon the naivete, but couldn't he just stop doing that?

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#126

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

protonimitate wrote: post #28

I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of m…

I agree Slack can be used effectively, but I don’t think its design encourages it. It encourages massive distraction — more active user time — by its default client and organization level settings.

Nor do I think this is as simple as “you can simply exit the program.” If the company or team has certain expectations on communication that won’t work if you do it without consulting with your team. A lot of people are not in this sort of position where they can take an action like that and not be ostracized.

Imagine ignoring calls or emails from your boss for a day or two when it’s clear that boss expects responses in a specific time? Exiting Slack can have the same effect at a lot of companies.

I simply think more companies need to take the time to discuss how tools will be used and for what purposes so everyone is on the same page. We have always published an etiquette guide that is open for debate/change. But most places I’ve worked use Slack and most places simply don’t discuss how it’s used so everyone has different expectations. And being the one person trying to fix this problem in a team can make you feel crazy.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#127

Post by PhasmaFelis »

swozey wrote: post #123

Slack makes me miss Discord. Slack has taken a hard stance on how company culture should dictate it's use and doesn't give you the options to customize it away from their own viewpoint at all. I use Slack on a massive 40k person server (and probably 10 other servers) and it's absolutely terrible in this environment, as a non-admin you have no self support mechanisms (blocking DMs, muting users, etc). I really wish FO…

It's weird how Discord is better at being Slack than Slack is, in addition to everything else Discord does.

I wonder if Discord could make a business-oriented fork without the integrated game store and so forth.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#128

Post by beat »

mindcrime wrote: post #91
beat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times?

The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all times? Hand them a copy of Deep Work ? Also, don't just turn it off... announce to the group "Hey guys, I'm going offline to do deep work for the next 3 hours. Only interrupt me if the building is on fire, OK?" or something like that. Set a status or "away message"…

Sure, technically it can be done. Socially, though... we have a hard time saying no to people. That's a lot to overcome. We have tools for interruption and social inhibitions against not using them.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#129

Post by deepakhj »

glvn wrote: post #106
protonimitate wrote: post #28

I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of m…

I would add to this, Slack can be a fantastic tool or it can be the bane of your workday, it all comes down to how your company/team use Slack. On my team almost everything goes into the main team chat; however, every message is tagged with the person it's aimed at and any team-wide communication is tagged @here. Any sub-conversation about that top-level message happens in the message thread. With this method, you ar…

I mute at here in all channels. It should be banned.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#130

Post by gumby »

protonimitate wrote: post #28

I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of m…

The article explicitly says they chose asynchronous by default -- which I interpret to mean that you switch off those notifications and make slack poll-only.

You talk about searching the history but to me the search tools are so weak that I figure only the recent slack messages have relevance -- instead slack is as transient as a text message. Mail at least can be searched as a corpus.

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