61–70 of 162 posts
Well Slack might have not worked for you. It doesn't work for everyone! Probably it works the worst for devs? Here is a story. I was working with a team of couple people located in different corners of the city. Everyone is remote except two who share an office. Up until a month ago everything was done over email. Sometimes you would send an email and get a reply in minutes, other times after hours. This was highly i…
If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications.
If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place.
If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your alerts into specific channels and muting those you don't care about? (Alerts are a bad example, though - really, you should use Slack for a visibility record during an incident, but the only alerts you should care about should bother you with PagerDuty or OpsGenie - if they're important, they should bother you).
I do work for a larger company (some 400 employees) and we use Slack quite effectively. One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus, we don't make decisions in Slack - everything of actual import should have a ticket to condense everything in. Slack becomes useful for us if we need immediate assistance, have questions or need to communicate in real time during an incident. It's also invaluable when you have remote employees (!).
Slack makes this very difficult and at least for me, is a primary cause of anxiety and fear of missing out I unironically wonder how widespread this problem is among the specific group of people who blame their lack of productivity on Slack, or failing that, how many people would admit their FOMO is enhanced by chat apps. So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't rea…
This feels like the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Of course you can assign moral blame however you please, but the relevant "policy" question (in both the gun case and the slack case) is empirical. You could measure the productivity of a single team with and without slack and see how things compare. My guess is Slack would not fare well in that experiment, but I've never done it.
You absolutely can but if there's something about my post that insinuates any sort of 'moral' blame that a comparison to the "Guns don't kill people" trope (there's probably a better word for this) is warranted, then I've massively failed to express my intent clearly. Allow me to unpack this a bit for clarity.
The logical framework for "Slack doesn't disrupt your productivity, you allow your productivity to be disrupted" is certainly there, but that's about where the comparison begins and ends to the "Guns don't kill people" argument.
What I instead mean is tools like Slack and other real-time persistent chat apps definitely exacerbate FOMO and the need to reply, respond or react in someway to a notification. Their express function is to notify, to that end they're doing what we effectively ask them to do by using them in our workplaces. Note: I'm speaking rather broadly here, I'm quite aware you very rarely have a choice in the matter when joining a new company what chat service you're stuck with using.
But as I mentioned in another comment, they have this capacity about as much as a hammer has the capacity to injure a user trying to drive nails and hang a picture.
My curiosity of how we effectively 'blame' (pretend I'm speaking with a velvet glove here when I say blame I mean it as positively and delicately as possible) Slack for breaking our concentration is with the hammer analogy in mind. Certainly it has the capacity to disrupt but just like one would probably hold and use a hammer delicately enough to avoid harming themselves but deliberately enough to drive a nail, our comms stacks can easily be wielded just as well.
(That was a bunch of words up there above, but let me raise my hand right now and admit that I am absolutely guilty of checking every notification I see come in and breaking my own flow, it's why I even hold this position).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Things are going to get missed Hit the nail on the head here. Things will get missed. The nice thing about Slack is that you can at least catch up with some conversations you missed at the end of day or in your free time. When you miss an IRL meeting, it's much harder to catch up. FOMO will be an even bigger problem when people start setting up meetings, especially ones where you aren't invited to or you can't atte…
We don't stop communicating since we unslacked though. Instead we now moved discussions more to Github PRs+issues and Basecamp. So its still possible to read up, but it feels more structured around certain tasks.
This might be the key to whatever becomes the big "Slack-killer", assuming one comes around: Real-time-ish chat that with respects to workflow and UI/UX are structured around action-items (be they user stories, support tickets, or deployment artifacts), easily searchable, with support for taxonomy.
Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.s…
>, I believe that slack in general is a waste of time in a TEAM. Why not have meetings or meet up in real life rather than hiding behind a screen without any physical interaction? In the book "Facebook Effect" by David Kirkpatrick[1], one programmer described how Mark Zuckerberg and the other programmers extensively chatted on AOL AIM even though they all sat at the same table elbow-to-elbow . When one of the new pro…
* Why does a chat blackout naturally follow a fear of missing out?
* What's different from the good ol' IRC days? Mute the channels, see them as transient, and focus on 1on1 conversations.
* Important conversations should not be solely communicated through a short-lived channel chat, but be summarized through email or whatever.
* You're already missing out on all the 1on1 conversations you're not in.
And I write this as someone who chronically checks for slack updates.
Maybe the "fear of missing out" isn't really about missing out on important information, as I initially thought, but about missing out on participation and the inevitable social/office dynamics around that?
I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your aler…
How do people coordinate around incidents without something like slack? It used to be that everyone had to hop on a conference bridge, which I personally never liked.
For important discussions and decisions, we often paste a log of a chat and a link into tickets or change requests. This helps capture the conversation and people can review and/or challenge what happened.
I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your aler…