Curing Our Slack Addiction
blog.agilebits.com
Curing Our Slack Addiction
1–10 of 187 posts
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#2I can imagine this same article being written many years ago when email first became ubiquitous in the workplace.
I worked at a large company where seemingly every day we would get several "someone has left the lights on in their blue Honda" type emails sent to everyone in the company.
Thankfully now I work in a small one without a carpark.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#3Interesting read, will have to see how it turned out (in case you guys move back to Slack :D). Although, I'm not sure changing tools is the right answer, it sounds like you guys had everything you wanted and more. Why not modify Slack to your liking and not change tools entirely, this eliminates the need to learn a whole new set of tools to do the same work.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#4I think for a team work effectively you need differentt tools - Slack for instant communication, Basecamp for tracking project status, Trello for organising work flow and etc. It is impossible to have a tool that fits all your needs.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#5Wow really surprised to hear they broke up with Slack. It seemed like a very good long explanation of the problem, basically no mention of any attempt to fix the problem, and then dropping the tool. We are deep into Slack and still liking it, but seeing some strain. This really rings true: "some of the most positive and uplifting individuals I know come off as curt and stressed and pissed off in Slack conversations."
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#6"Slack as the new email" is spot on. And the article identifies it too.
The problem isn't the tool. The problem is people. Giving people more and better ways to communicate creates more noise, not necessarily more signal.
Constraining communication to channels that only allow signal feels bureaucratic (complete form 31/b to request new business cards and send to purchasing no later than the second week of the month).
There's a happy medium (pun intended) somewhere between the two.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#7You have to think of slack channels as coworking place and meeting rooms.
You need to live mainly in one channel (the equivalent of the physical open office), and go to the other channels when called in, or when you have a bit of down time to check what's going on there. Like the buildings where we used to work, you do not need to visit every room.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#8Wow really surprised to hear they broke up with Slack. It seemed like a very good long explanation of the problem, basically no mention of any attempt to fix the problem, and then dropping the tool. We are deep into Slack and still liking it, but seeing some strain. This really rings true: "some of the most positive and uplifting individuals I know come off as curt and stressed and pissed off in Slack conversations."
tht makes no sense, every1 i kno is rlly good at xpressing their emotions in txt
For real though, it's amazing what core parts of human interaction people will try to replace with an app. People need to understand what they're really giving up with face-to-face or verbal communication.. thousands of years of highly developed body language, tone, etc.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#9> We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the quick fix we all needed.
I'm seeing this across numerous open source project communities, and it's really infuriating. B/c these communities are not paying Slack, they don't have access to archives, and of course it's all invisible to Google. So a valuable Q&A that might help thousands of people over many years were in on a public forum winds up helping...the handful of people who were in the channel on the day it happened.
Re: Curing Our Slack Addiction
#10It sounds like a signal to noise ratio problem. The problem is that there wasn't a sound way to filter noise (multiple channels failed) so they were forced to deal with all the noise to make sure they didn't miss anything relevant.
The constant policing they mention at the end was probably enough overhead for them to consider alternatives, though I don't understand what they mean with this quote: "Furthermore, Slack was not designed for the deep, meaningful conversations that are needed to move 1Password forward."
On the surface, it sounds like a people/culture problem, but I'm sure there were other factors at AgileBits that contributed.