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Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

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Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#191

Post by philwelch »

omginternets wrote: post #183
patwolf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. I say legitimate because it's not just missing out on inconsequential chatter. Slack is a business tool and business decisions get make over slack. The folks that read every messages and respond quickly are therefore the ones that get to contribute the most to decisions. When waiting too long to respond, the conversation has already changed…

>I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. Call me rigid, but isn't the ability to overcome this kind of silly stuff exactly what separates well-adjusted adults from everyone else? When you catch yourself doing things out of FOMO, take your dispositions and fix it. In this case: close the app, or configure the alerts. I'm sometimes alarmed by how people seem to have zero self-knowl…

That’s by design. We live in a culture that treats everyone like children because adults are too difficult to manage and manipulate.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#192

Post by about_help »

projectdelphai wrote: post #163
shaggyfrog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easily the most misused feature of Slack. Using @here in a channel is the equivalent of standing on your desk and shouting at everyone around you. So what happens is, like you, everyone starts muting it. And then you just have people shouting into the void.

I think you should rules about it at the workplace. At mine, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've seen an @here. And one of them, the person was told he shouldn't have done it since it wasn't important. Really makes everything think before they use it.

We use separate channels for different projects and people join/leave as needed. @here is incredibly useful when you have a general question and not sure who might have insight.

It all boils down to how people use the communications channel. I see @here multiple times a week but do not feel like it is a big distraction. At worst it can create a few minutes of distraction from my current workflow and if I'm truly in the middle of a thought process I ignore the message for a little bit or unless a 2nd notification hits.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#193

Post by tabbott »

ethbro wrote: post #180
StavrosK wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much like Zulip, it's open source and much closer to email, even culturally. It encourages long-form replies and messages with subjects, so it requires at least a tiny amount of thought before you start talking to someone. I think it's a great cross between Slack and email.

Just looked at it. What keeps Zulip threads from exploding in practice? Either on the UI or usage side? E.g. How to I keep from going from "One channel with a hundred unread messages" to "One channel with twenty unread threads"? Also, what features exist when a thread diverges from the original topic? E.g. We were talking about the "afternoon lunch" at the "annual meeting", and then someone mentioned their favorite r…

The point is that it's a lot faster to process 20 unread threads with 100 messages than 100 unread messages, because they're nicely grouped. E.g. you can skip reading the 30 messages in the thread about "afternoon lunch", without having to look at those messages (as you would with slack if you wanted to find out that the 'annual meeting' announcement happened).

For diverging topics, you can easily edit the topics of the messages that are a diversion to be a new topic. This helps a huge amount when you have new users who haven't learned the convention of creating a new topic when bringing up something unrelated, since anyone can clean it up in a few seconds.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#194

Post by handoflixue »

omginternets wrote: post #183
patwolf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. I say legitimate because it's not just missing out on inconsequential chatter. Slack is a business tool and business decisions get make over slack. The folks that read every messages and respond quickly are therefore the ones that get to contribute the most to decisions. When waiting too long to respond, the conversation has already changed…

>I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. Call me rigid, but isn't the ability to overcome this kind of silly stuff exactly what separates well-adjusted adults from everyone else? When you catch yourself doing things out of FOMO, take your dispositions and fix it. In this case: close the app, or configure the alerts. I'm sometimes alarmed by how people seem to have zero self-knowl…

You're missing the key modifier: legitimate. It's not an irrational fear of missing out; it is a very real concern about a culture where being less responsive on Slack reduces your influence on key business decisions. "Close the app" is only good advice if you both want to and can afford to opt-out of any involvement in those decisions.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#196

Post by freehunter »

handoflixue wrote: post #194
omginternets wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think there's a legitimate FOMO involved with not quickly reading messages. Call me rigid, but isn't the ability to overcome this kind of silly stuff exactly what separates well-adjusted adults from everyone else? When you catch yourself doing things out of FOMO, take your dispositions and fix it. In this case: close the app, or configure the alerts. I'm sometimes alarmed by how people seem to have zero self-knowl…

You're missing the key modifier: legitimate. It's not an irrational fear of missing out; it is a very real concern about a culture where being less responsive on Slack reduces your influence on key business decisions. "Close the app" is only good advice if you both want to and can afford to opt-out of any involvement in those decisions.

Agreed. There are times I only join conference calls to ensure that no work gets assigned to me without me hearing about it first, or that I have the ability to chime in as work is being assigned. I implemented this policy when it became clear that work was being assigned to me (imo incorrectly) because I wasn't there to say no.

If decisions are being made over Slack, I have to be involved or suddenly I may find myself responsible for something I have no control over. Simply because I was not there to let people know who actually is responsible.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#197

Post by llama052 »

lisper wrote: post #188
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…

> You can always just exit the program. Or never start to use it in the first place. The fundamental problem with Slack is that its interactions are not structure in the right way to be useful in non-real-time. An email thread has two critical pieces of structure that Slack threads lack: a subject line, and a beginning . With email, it's easy to tell where a particular discussion started, and which messages have to d…

I'd argue that they all have their place. Anything of great length that's related to something product wise that has impact should be discussed in an epic or ticket that links the main point back.

As anyone who's followed a giant email chain, I think that slack is at-least a little bit easier to follow. Albeit I'm working in a company that is just now trying to start to emphasize stories/tickets/chat over email for everything, with tons of pushback.

Gone are the days of email everything, tons of people are CC'd, email chains are 30-50 responses in. It's absolutely unmanageable. Oh and if you drop chat, let's start logging alerts to email, or bugs to email. It's useless.

Personally I'll use chat for anything relatively quick or unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I'll use email for when it's not something that requires a response right away but generally is also unimportant to the company projects and doesn't involve a ton of collaboration. Anything bigger than that goes in a system that's suitable for tracking projects or complicated topics.

I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for communication.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#198

Post by dredmorbius »

The only thing that's made large discussion platforms useful to me is ruthless blocking of noise. As one of my more popular G+ posts[1] said; "This One Trick Will Revolutionize Your Use of Social Media: Block fuckwits."[2]

The problem with entepriise tools, both technical capabilities and organisational contexts, is that this is often neither supported nor acceptable.

Everyone does not have to have full interrupt access to everyone else.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.goog...

________________________________

Notes:

1. Thank you, Internet Archive.

2. Based on my Google Data Takeout, about 3,000 blocked profiles. I'll miss those.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#199

Post by gamma3 »

I close Slack and focus on coding. I take short breaks from coding every 1-2 hours, and check Slack.

Replying to someone 2 hours later has never been an issue.

If it's urgent, people drop by my desk.

Definitely don't have slack on my phone, and when Slack is closed, I don't get any kind of notifications.

Being able to focus is important. In the end it matters I deliver on the project, not that I reply to every question immediately.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#200

Post by gamma3 »

lisper wrote: post #188
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…

> You can always just exit the program. Or never start to use it in the first place. The fundamental problem with Slack is that its interactions are not structure in the right way to be useful in non-real-time. An email thread has two critical pieces of structure that Slack threads lack: a subject line, and a beginning . With email, it's easy to tell where a particular discussion started, and which messages have to d…

It's possible to have structured conversations by always using threads.

I've convinced everyone at two companies so far (50 and 20 people) to never reply directly in a channel, and always use threads:

https://medium.com/@martinkonicek/how-to-slack-6f5bf9be71ba

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