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Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

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Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#181

Post by davidscolgan »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #173
davidscolgan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not Slack encourages workflows (and I can see how it would), I think in order to be an effective human in the modern era _requires_ thinking critically about technology choices and how to use them. Cal Newport's new book Digital Minimalism was a great read about this - be intentional about your tech choices, and be intentional about when and how you use them. Otherwise it's super easy to just get sucked in…

I completely agree, but I don't think that means we should ignore or withhold criticism when a company like Slack has immense power over how other companies operate. We should be scrutinizing the decisions they make because it does affect us. Many of these decisions you refer to are not made by the individual employee, but by the team lead, PM, or the executives, who are not always very connected to how those decisio…

Absolutely, I see two avenues of attack. As an individual, I see that Slack exists and is widely used in tech. I can't really say no to using them, but I can do what I can to protect myself. If a company requires bad online hygiene, that's certainly a difficult problem.

On the broader level, I definitely think the larger the company and the larger influence it has, the more scrutiny it needs. People who are in charge need to recognize the externalities of what they are making, and the potential negative side effects they can have. I have been somewhat encouraged at least in that this conversation seems to be happening lately.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#182

Post by Tempest1981 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #169
Tempest1981 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a voyeuristic tendency of some people to watch other people work. You can join a few dozen Slack channels, and peek in on them constantly, similar to twitter or reddit. Maybe a desire to find drama? Vs focus on your own "boring" problem. The funny thing is, it can make you feel productive!

If that's true, then it's in no way Slack that is the problem. I can't help but think there has to be something more.

Slack is an enabler, making it easier. Same as any social media.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#183

Post by omginternets »

patwolf wrote: post #70
nottorp wrote: post #63

I don't understand. Why do you allow Slack to interrupt you? Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it overflows. Easy as ABC. I run like 6 different messaging platforms, but none is allowed to interrupt me. If you can't restrain yourself from checking messages constantly, you have a problem not the medium.

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-knowledge and appear to run on auto-pilot, guided by base impulses.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#184

Post by smolder »

matchbok wrote: post #76

Experiment for slack lovers: Start talking about something in a channel with ~20 people. Have another use try to start another conversation in the same channel. This is a common occurrence. The other users either have to spam the channel or wait until your topic is complete, which could never be! What happens? Garbage. Chat is not how work gets done. Or how knowledge is transferred and, most importantly, retained.

There are a few ways of dealing with this that I've seen. On IRC, when a direct back-and-forth starts, etiquette is to name the other party specifically at the start of each line. Every client I've used will highlight those lines where your name is mentioned, making it easier to pick out your thread of conversation. The text is typically packed in pretty tight as well, which makes this more feasible in busy channels since you're not likely to have to scroll. Some clients also have a separate UI section for messages that target you, making it even easier to follow.

In Slack, the chat contents are shown in a less dense way (more whitespace & separation, big user icons,) but they found a solution that seems to work pretty well, which is the 'thread' feature. (This is pretty recent AFAIK.) Threads stay collapsed for people who aren't participating and pop out for people who want to.

While they are pretty much inevitable, multiple orthogonal conversations happening in a channel might also sometimes be a call for reorganization or sidebar channels/group chats.

As an aside, one of my favorite experiences relating to chat is having multiple concurrent conversations with the same person or people, on different topics, in their respective channels. It highlights how bizarre the rapid context-switching pattern you fall into with chat applications is.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#185

Post by EForEndeavour »

smoe wrote: post #176
EForEndeavour wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently. This is an overly harsh assumption. There are plenty of compelling real-world examples of organized, effective people being blocked by some small but urgent thing that's not their fault and requires a few minutes of attention from someone else. If a dev just started on my project but the DB cred…

True, I'm a bit harsh on this, but I also used the word usually instead of always on purpose. Yes, sometimes someone can really get blocked and not able to work, no problem to ask for help in this case. On the other hand I have seen it enough times that people (especially juniors and bosses) continuously ask question without having bothered to think about it prior. Forcing them to deal with a problem by themselves fo…

Fair enough: I agree that plenty of people prematurely ask someone rather than try to figure out a solution by searching, thinking, experimenting, etc., and using Slack as an asynchronous channel will generally encourage people to hack a bit more at their problem before instinctively distracting the person next to them.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#186

Post by ebiester »

Jedd wrote: post #43
ethbro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Slack is asynchronous. You are describing a proprietary, expensive, intrusive, demanding rewrite of SMTP.

The protocol isn't the issue.

It's like SMTP, if nearly every conversation went to list-all and our email clients were designed to intelligently allow us to choose what sub-section of the thousands of messages a day are important to us.

Or, like we already knew, it's an expensive, intrusive, proprietary upgrade of IRC.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#187

Post by ethbro »

Agathos wrote: post #157
ethbro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's far more scalable than ticketing. Issues can be resolved in three lines of text, rather than ticket creation, queue, assignment, closing, etc. My experience has been that it goes on for thirty or three hundred lines of problem report -> steps to reproduce -> troubleshooting -> proposed solution -> etc. Two days later someone else gets pulled in so they look at a Jira ticket with an empty description and zero c…

It's a balance.

At some point, a channel should be created for the issue (if long lived) or Slack conversations transplanted onto a ticket.

On the other hand, I've had an equal number of times where ticket formalism led to a misunderstanding, someone on another team taking an incorrect action, and a couple weeks to get resolved.

Work that could have been saved with 10 minutes of direct communication.

Or the dreaded hot potato ticket that out of misunderstanding / laziness gets reassigned to different teams, until a week passes without any actual work done.

So, I guess the optimal solution is to know what each tool is good and bad at, and let those guide actions and policies.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#188

Post by lisper »

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 do with that discussion. On Slack, these things are all intertwingled. In order to find the beginning of a discussion you have to scan everything in the channel. That is what makes Slack a distraction. It's much harder (like virtually impossible) to filter content by topic after the fact.

Re: Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

#189

Post by ebiester »

commandlinefan wrote: post #50

Deep work? We live in a world of open offices, daily standups, max-four-hour JIRA tickets and pair/mob programming. The people in charge don't believe that "deep work" even means anything.

You really can get deep work done in pair and mob programming, especially when trained in it.

Consider https://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programm... as an example of how it can look. Mind you, I don't recommend 10 hour sessions ever, much less to begin.

I find it odd to believe that intense, deep work can only happen in solo.

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