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How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

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Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#51

Post by acranox »

icc97 wrote: post #37
jshakes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product, it's unfair to expect users to accept all the responsibility of mitigating against that. Software companies aren't using organizational productivity as a benchmark for their success, just usage statistics. So no, Slack doesn't enforce a single way of working, but it is engineered to co…

> I think the problem is that when tools like Slack are engineered in such a way as to make people dependent on their product It's a chat client. It's an addictive medium. It sounds to me like you're shooting the messenger. Skype, Hangouts, or any IM client wants your attention. Slack is just a better version of all the other IM clients I've used (for work). If you don't want to be disturbed you close Slack. I suspec…

It can be a little of both.

> I suspect that if you've got problems with Slack, it means that there's a problem in the culture of where you work.

One can work somewhere that has a problem in the culture, and Slack can make that worse. It's been interesting to me to observe when my company changed from hipchat to slack, my productivity went down until I recognized how slack was messing me up (because of the default UI patterns it came with) and I've had to unwind that by changing a bunch of settings and patterns.

It's been a similar change when I moved from a company that used email and tickets for team communication, to one that uses chat.

Yes, the culture if the heart of the problems, but the tools can amplify those problems.

It's like if you can't cut a piece of wood effectively with a handsaw, but I give you a power saw, you may soon have much bigger problems on your hands. (or hand, if you really mess it up)

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#52

Post by paulryanrogers »

dreamfactored wrote: post #6

The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated alerts

This is one major advantage, alongside ease of setup and use, and free up to 10k messages.

Still, I've gotten duplicate messages, delayed messages, and even out of order messages.

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#54

Post by dwb »

jshakes wrote: post #27
dwb wrote: post #18

I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing. My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only, mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for non-primary teams, and unsubscri…

OP here. Iit's telling that so many people are commenting in this thread about how Slack isn't that bad because you can customize it to be less attention-grabbing. The fact remains that Slack is engineered to be attention-grabbing out of the box. Sure you can tweak it to make it less shouty, but Slack is still a product that is sold for money by a company. It's not in their interests to make it align with your existi…

I'm very sympathetic to that line of argument, I'm no fan of capitalism, but choosing the default settings for something like Slack (whether you are selling it in order to make a profit or not) appears to me to be a tradeoff between making it immediately useful, and obvious to non-nerds why it is useful, and being less attention-grabbing when your team gets a bit more unwieldy. I've no doubt there's more they could do and more care they could take, but Slack do publicise the customisations you can make.

(In an ideal world of course we'd be using a chat system that has a great user experience, is based on open standards, _and_ is somehow easy to deploy... but within our current economic system that is clearly a tricky one.)

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#55

Post by gtolle »

MatekCopatek wrote: post #11
dreamfactored wrote: post #6

The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated alerts

Sure, but there are still two major problems IMHO. Firstly, there's no practical and intentional workflow to postpone things (an equivalent of "mark as unread"). Secondly, because a majority of people responds to notifications immediately, it becomes socially unacceptable to not do it in a timely manner.

There's the "remind me about this" feature for messages. The intervals are well-spaced, too. (in 20 mins, in 1 hour, in 3 hours, tomorrow). I find it to be a great way to deal with an interruption that can't be ignored entirely, but comes while I'm in the middle of doing something more important.

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#57

Post by ravenstine »

rsj_hn wrote: post #49
ravenstine wrote: post #28

Mute all the channels. Ignore messages that don't matter. Configure it to notify you if someone mentions "lunch". Done. Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.

You're going to get a lot of denial, because chatting with colleagues and sharing memes/news is fun -- and hey, it's related to work. And every once in a while, important info is transmitted. Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't. Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it! T…

Multi-tasking is insidious because there are plenty of people who can sustain productivity whilst spending a significant amount of time on Slack; their acceptable level of production blinds them to just how much further ahead they could get without Slack(and other distractions), and it can cause others to feel ashamed for their lack of performance. I keep a presence on Slack and do some of the usual fun stuff, but have taken the steps I outlined after I continued to discover just how much of a penalty gets imposed on the brain when it has to frequently switch contexts.

> Also, there is a bit of a technological bias here. If you were to ask someone what is the worst possible kind of work meeting, they would tell you that it's the meeting that has no clear agenda, no one seems to be in charge, everyone is piping in with whatever's on their mind, and there is no well-defined stop period so the meeting goes on until no one has anything left to chime in about. Basically, Slack.

What you said here is a very astute observation. I'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall.

To be fair, people hate those sorts of physical meetings because they usually don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved. Even when Slack is a distraction, there is a perceived redeeming value to the lack of productivity because posting a meme or a poignant joke can make one appear to be more funny in general. True, a person's Slack persona can affect how others perceive that person in real life, but then you have to wonder just what you're getting for impressing these particular people. TLDR; people actually hate formality.

As I stated before, coworkers are not your friends. I say this as someone who works with an unusually friendly team. We pay Mario Kart after work every few weeks, and we sometimes hang on Saturdays to chill and play Civ V. In fantasy land, these people are my friends. In reality, that friendship would sublimate instantly if I ever left the company. I've never experienced otherwise. It's friendship in the most superficial sense, which isn't a bad thing, but people with similarly friendly coworkers shouldn't sacrifice energy they'd be devoting to their craft for the sake of cultivating fake friendships.

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#58

Post by tomjen3 »

ravenstine wrote: post #28

Mute all the channels. Ignore messages that don't matter. Configure it to notify you if someone mentions "lunch". Done. Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.

You don't have to mute the channels - just set the default notification to nothing, and you need to do that anyway, as you can't mute slackbot.

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#59

Post by tomjen3 »

icc97 wrote: post #38
ivansavz wrote: post #16

I think personal comms + general channel announcements are OK. Just close slack and when you come back check any specific communications for you asynchronously, or if you want to catch up on "what's been up" you can browse message threads. On the other hand @here/@channel messages are terrible! Now these are terrible because they confuse the "broadcast" nature messages with personal messages.

Then surely agree with the people at your work to never use @channel. It's basically the same as 'Reply All', it's a waste of everyone's time.

It is a lot easier (several orders of magnitudes) to change software than to chance people (especially for programmers) - so the focus should be on changing software.

Re: How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

#60

Post by rsj_hn »

ravenstine wrote: post #57
rsj_hn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to get a lot of denial, because chatting with colleagues and sharing memes/news is fun -- and hey, it's related to work. And every once in a while, important info is transmitted. Also, people swear they can multi-task just fine, when in fact they can't. Just like people swear they only need 4 hours of sleep. It's strange, but very few people say "Hey, I eat 300g of sugar each day, and my body loves it! T…

Multi-tasking is insidious because there are plenty of people who can sustain productivity whilst spending a significant amount of time on Slack; their acceptable level of production blinds them to just how much further ahead they could get without Slack(and other distractions), and it can cause others to feel ashamed for their lack of performance. I keep a presence on Slack and do some of the usual fun stuff, but ha…

I'm tempted to print it out and post it on my wall.

That's kind of you! Now I wish I'd cleaned it up a bit.

they usually don't serve to bolster the social proof of most of the individuals involved.

Yes, that's true. Online interactions have this extra layer of karma collection (whether explicit or implicit).

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