Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
1–10 of 205 posts
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#2We're a very small company which makes this all easier, but we've ended up with a similar Slack convention of everything being in threads and it makes Slack a lot more managable.
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#3One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, you end up missing stuff. You can send out a group email, but people are reluctant to reply-all, so this doesn't get good discussion either.
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#4I wish Slack had a feature to "threadify" comments that have already been made. I wouldn't even mind if Slack channels could designate certain users as "thread czars" that had the ability to move other users comments into a thread.
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#5No post body was provided.
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#6One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, y…
How did that work well when nothing was ever in order?
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#7In the main article Slack communication is assumed to be synchronous.
I find life to be a little happier when it's assumed to be asynchronous.
That means turning off some channel notifications.
When I really want effective synchronous communication I tend to escalate from Slack to audio or video a screen share -- it seems like there's an extra layer of collaboration that you can have with a bit higher bandwidth.
For meetings I like to have audio plus a screen share of a shared document -- usually not a Slack document, because it's valuable to have more than one person be able to make edits.
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#8I agree with the author that threading is quite critical to maintaining sanity.
In my experience, it's insufficient by itself. I would recommend coupling with some naming conventions around channels and discouraging group DMs for anything substantial.
I wrote up some of my thoughts on this in a post: https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2021-08-02-taming-slack/
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#9Did they just re-invent Zulip? :P
Re: Can Slack-mania be cured with systemized discipline?
#10One of the things I miss working at Facebook is the internal FB (called Workplace). It basically replaced email for the whole company, and worked really well for long form posts where maybe you would write some proposal up or make an announcement and get a bunch of comments. I now work at a slack centric company, and it just doesn't compare - there is no 'newsfeed', so unless you remember to check all the channels, y…
I work there currently and I agree - I can imagine frustration for a while after leaving and not having a good place to make a bunch of posts.
Posts and work groups are actually a generally good way for scalable work communication - and leaving a public and searchable record. This doesn't replace Google docs and wikis, but serve as another layer to organize them. (I promise this doesn't lead to needless bureaucracy, that still happens but not because of Workplace).