Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

Agreed. Its not just about the tool but how you use it. For us it actually helps to get less distracted. There are very few things that require a sub 3 hour reaction. So we just put a question in Slack even if it's for the person sitting right next to you. Eventually the person will answer when they have some time. Much better than constantly having someone tipping one your shoulder or calling you

Just because you have instant messages doesn't mean you have to respond instantly. Disable notifications and checking every few hours is plenty enough. If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently.

Seems like you only deal with small teams. Texting, calling, or standing up and talking don't scale well. Talking doesn't work when people aren't sitting next to one another in the same city, state, country, or hemisphere. Calling isn't going to work either, as you are limited to audio only and makes triaging situations more difficult. And texting is clumsy at best, and doesn't assist with triaging. And none of these methods make it easy to integrate tooling. Not to mention any sort of regulations.

As for email, it works for longer form stuff. But not for having a real time conversation that involves multiple people. It's akin to saying Google Docs is useless because you can collaborate on a document in email.

Like any tool, it's how you use it. Slack can be distracting if you let it. It can be useless if you don't use the tools it gives you. Can you do everything slack does with other tools? Sure. But it will require a massive amount of effort to get you up and running again.

This is exactly why I don't use it. It's pretty much treated as synchronous communication. Sure, you can step away and ignore dialog for awhile to concentrate and do work, but people expect you to read back through what you missed and don't want to repeat discussions.

A few people tried to push it on my team when it started growing in popularity and immediately I noticed how much of a time sink it was. No thank you, I have enough hurdles to delivery, I don't need additional artificial hurdles I have some say in.

I worked at a startup where we were always having a hard time finding documents and conversations. Almost every other week we would try or consider adding another place to store documents as a solution for this problem.

I saw from the beginning that this made no sense at all, that adding a new sharing service could only make the problem worse but I could only slow this trend down.

A real solution would involve an intelligent aggregator that sucks it down from those sources and imposes some structure on it together with you.

For instance the python docs have everything you need to know about Python, Google and stack overflow are wrong at least half the time. So I build trails over the documents that get me to reference materials i need in 1 or 2 clicks.

Control of document sharing is also a big thing in Biz.

The star salesperson was trained as a lawyer. Ask him how to share a document and he will tell you to do it the same way my accountant does it. He doesn't mind it when I show him something in Github because he knows familiarity with Github gets him far in credibility with everybody.

Elsewhere in the business people use Google Docs and also collaborate with the hugest businesses on Earth. People at those businesses might not believe Google Docs is secure and it is not good for the relationship when somebody shares a Google Doc in Google.

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 and it's too late to contribute. And Slack's threads don't solve that problem IMHO.