How to make Slack less bad for you
robertheaton.com
robertheaton.com
This post reads to me as another snowflake in the very justified avalanche of "Internet is drowning me in pointless chatter" complaints that define our time.
I use Slack this way with my team and it works wonderfully for me:
- I disable all notifications
- I tell people to PM me if they need me to act
- I tell people to carry on discussion in the relevant project/topic channel if they need to chat about said project/topic
These points are ordered by importance. The first is vastly more important than the others and extends beyond Slack. I aggressively disable notifications of all kinds from all things. If I can't disable them I at least disable their ability to make sound or vibrate. I have one way to be immediately "notified" and that is to call my mobile. I can count the people who know and use that number on one hand. They're so close to me that they know if I truly need to be informed of something now - in their respective sphere of family, friends, or work - and they call me and I pick up.
The PMs I read and act on when it's my Slacking time. I open up Slack and crank through them. Slacking time happens one or more times a day depending on my bandwidth.
The other channels I read if and only if I have a justified need to know what's going on with that project/topic. Or if I have downtime and am curious about something. Grazing on info about what my team is up to in project X is a nicer distraction than watching TV.
I am also that crazy guy who actually uninstalled Facebook from his phone and just goes to the website when he feels like catching up with friends. So I'm not subject to that megacorp's constant interruptions either. I don't feel like my life has lost anything at all by doing this.
The problem isn't Slack, it isn't Facebook, it's notifications, turn them off and tell the world that if they want your attention they have to call you and they can't have your number unless you love them.
At this point it sounds like slack is now just email at which point I question the value it is adding. Assuming everyone else does the same things in the same way you'll never have a responsive conversation over slack like this and may as well skip it entirely.
Slack adds much more value in the area of project-oriented channels which do get a lot of real-time conversation happening in them during business hours, and also retain an email-like record for anyone who logs in later on and wants to catch up.
With slack I have to read everything. It's like having to read through not just my inbox but also everyone else's inbox and on top of that no way to mute threads period. Sure I can not follow a channel. That equivalent to a unsubscribing from a mailing list. But, like I said above, a mailing list has threads so I can mute or ignore any threads I'm not interested in. With slack I have to read it all
Lots of people have a pathological fear of being left out / not in the know. Just the other day a co-worker was lamenting how much time he spends checking all the channels just because he didn't want to miss something...
Because slack hallway conversations have a lower barrier than real ones, therefore it can be more taxing on people than real life, or other forms of communication, would be.
Slack on the other hand those things are possible and because they are possible many people expect their conversations on slack will be/must be referenced. You can claim all you want that's not what they should do but it's empirically what a large percentage of slack users actually do
1. It sandboxes resource usage, preventing Slack from being a permanent resource hog. Is your Slack tab running hot on Chrome? Just kill it for now. There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.
2. Closing the Slack browser tab means no disruptive notifications. Sure, you can snooze Slack @-mentions, etc., but that's too much of "working hard to make the tool work."
3. Better workflow (seriously) Perhaps this is just me (or my function as a marketing person at a startup), but I work almost entirely inside the browser (GMail, Google Docs, various sites for research, SaaS apps). Using Slack as a standalone desktop app means I have to focus away from the browser. Using Slack as a browser tab means I can treat it just one of several web apps I use regularly.
4. Bonus point: No need to update your Slack client =)
1. irssi is ridiculously low resource usage. It never melts down.
2. No notifications by default. I actually have a script that gives me notifications. It's quite cool because I filter the messages by regexp so that I only see what I want to see. Also, it uses my normal desktop notifications which means that they show up where I want them to, with the right font, in the right colour, lasting for the time I want them to. One tip: my default notifications do not stay up long enough to read them. It just gives me an indication that people are talking. I can notice a word or two and if it strikes my interest I can go to irssi and see what they are talking about.
3. I'm a programmer, so I'm always in my console. Same sauce, different flavour ;-)
I occasionally use slack from the browser because it has some features which are useful (like showing images), but I do that only on demand.
One of the things that is useful is that the people who like using slack on my team also have a lot of experience with IRC. They have good etiquette. Chatter is kept in the right channels so that it can be ignored easily. Work channels are about work and have a really high signal to noise ratio. Some teams are so good at it that if I want to get an overview of what's going on in their project I can simply subscribe to their slack channel. It's great for me since I work remote.
1. Text logs that you can grep. I've probably grepped dozens of times for ip addresses, conversations where I know i mentioned someone or they mentioned me, etc.
2. No deletes or edits, once it's been sent to your client there is no mechanism to retract it like there is in the browser or native client.
It feels like the "git history should never be modified!" fundamentalists. Pragmatism always wins out in the end.
In practice the editing feature is not a problem. The pros outweigh any cons. Point me to the groups of people talking about the disasters that ensued once they allowed editing?
Some groups have a problem with people forking email threads. Education works wonders.
(Although, for 1 and 2, it seems like temporarily closing the Slack app would work just as well.)
I can see the appeal, however. Write once run anywhere is a hell of a drug.
It's not just that. It's that you're not paid to write good code, nor efficient code. You're paid to write any shit that works good enough to be sold to users, and to write it as quickly as you can.
Any clues on what to google for? I've tried the Great Suspender and wasn't very impressed.
Browser notification support is still evolving.
The native apps also have more awareness of when a user is active since they can read into activity outside the window frame.
Maybe I'd rather not have that...
Even on #random. It seemed like such a good idea at the time - keep "water cooler" chat out of the main channels. But what really happens is that all the fun stuff goes on in #random, so you pay as much or more attention to it as anything else. Who wants to be late for the party?
And there's the uncapitalized, unpunctuated, line-by-line stream of consciousness writing style I ranted about some time ago:
I think the OP is right that a UI needs to be sensitive to the user's psyche and not push them all the time toward using the product.
Message dev
And my first subconscious thought is that "Message" is being used as an adjective: are we talking about the "Message dev"? Who is that?
I think it would be helpful if the prompt used the standard notation for channel names:
Message #dev
Send a message to #dev Message dev
Message #devUpdate: I'm curious why you're getting downvoted for your comment. Maybe people didn't like the creative way you put it? For me that made it all the better. Instead of some dry analysis, I like hearing what's going on in someone's head.
Drama aside, for me the problem with that message is that it's just distracting.
I actually hate that Chrome's little status bar at the bottom blocks the "bob is typing" message if you happen to be mouse-overing a link!
Preferences -> Messages & Media -> Display Options -> "Display information about who is currently typing a message"
The wording definitely threw me off - this would be a much better way to word the checkbox:
Display "someone is typing" messagesI agree the 'so-and-so is typing' is an anti-feature.
To their credit, I filed a feedback and they acknowledged the issue.
I'm curious why you feel this way, particularly if it's not a conversation you're actively participating in?
Then I realize someone may be doing like I do: typing an incomplete response, then going off to check some docs or to think about it, then come back to type some more, and pausing to think some more.
By the time all this happens, I've spent several minutes watching the "... is typing" messages, when I could have used those few minutes to take a stretch break, or pick up the mess on the desk, or just about anything but watching the "... is typing" messages.
After all, I'll get notified anyway when someone hits the Enter key.
I tend to view it as similar to seeing the facial/body cues I'd get normally [and often miss...] that tell me someone is attentive and participating - or about to- in in the conversation.
I learned elsewhere in this discussion that there's a config option to disable that feedback - I'm undecided on whether that's what I actually what I want...
Group chat isn't anything amazing with it but I haven't found it deficient. Maybe I'm using it wrong.
I've recently joined a new company where everybody loves to complain about Skype/Lync stating similar things to this. But I have zero issues, and had near zero issues at my prior company where it was widely used and improved remote working considerably. The only difference I can see is in this new company everybody is using MacOS (and admittedly when I tried it on Mac it was terrible).
The current solution requires persistent rooms to be enabled, a new AD account, and a VM running our proxy.
Once set up though, you can do 2-way, real-time sync between Slack channels and SfB rooms (https://vimeo.com/174265102).
Even when running IRC in the browser with IRCCloud it's snappy.
Mattermost is trivial to self-host so that's probably not a bad option if you're looking for something closer to slack (I think?).
This way all the private stuff can stay inside the network and behind VPN if needed. Security 101 really.
the slack servers probably get a lot more security attention than your private XMPP or IRC server that probably sees a few minutes a year of attention from some engineer to run "apt-get dist-upgrade" or something.
Also, Slack is a much bigger and juicier target for attack.
Ultimately it's a tradeoff. You may need to pay more attention to security in-house, but in exchange you're no longer tying the critical aspects of your business to some random SV web startup that is here today, but may get acquihired tomorrow and kill the product overnight.
I think of Slack as "IRC for yuppies". Seen this way, it makes sense. It doesn't have the low-level features of IRC, but it follows you around easily, when juggling multiple clients. For that, it's pretty good.
I don't love it, I don't hate it. It works, kinda. It's loud and attention-grabby, for sure.
A good email client for a business might filter all messages from other members of your company into a given folder, and then only notify for messages in that folder. Notifications for any other messages would just be blocked. Heck, don't even show them in the unread count until the user looks for them in particular.
And that's why Slack will not be a replacement for e-mail.
Your life doesn't turn around the company you're currently employed in. Or, at least mine doesn't. Company messages are only a small fraction of important messages I get daily.
(Not to mention that Slack killing e-mail would be a pretty dystopian future, with some single profit-seeking company controlling your primary means of communication.)
If your inbox is deluged with spam from outside the company, you need to filter your e-mail by domain.
This problem is easily solved with a filter, no?
What I do is simply mute the chatty channels, and go in when I need answers or get invited/DM'd.
Mute is pretty powerful.
I'd strongly suggest building a culture that Email and Slack are Asynchronous.
If something is time sensitive, take it to a synchronous channel which has cultural expectations that it is okay to interrupt the other person.
I don't find it specially disruptive this way. Way less than shouting from one side of the office "hey, check the deploy!"
Within that norm, all of the "Slack is an evil attention vampire" complaints feel deeply unfamiliar to me. I find it less distracting than email because @ makes message priority clear at a glance.
Of course, some of this seems to be about configuration approaches. I had forgotten that Slack's dock icon embeds notifications, because my dock minimizes when not in use.
My team uses Slack very asynchronously -- whenever you have something that needs feedback or whatever, you just post it in the appropriate channel, and expect responses to trickle in over maybe the next 24 hours. If someone sends "hey no rush but", then I legitimately do not rush to answer it -- just a different company culture I guess.
Why am I asking so? beacuse I use pomodoro and i've a script that sets slack to "do not disturb" when i'm in the pomodoro and switch it off (to the pls bother me mood) when i'm done.
The feature may never get implemented but the response is always nice... :slightly_smiling_face:
I learn a lot in slack and we have a big company, so I feel like helping people out with stuff during the day raises your profile. I'm kind of a python dabbler, but now I have people asking me directly about stuff because I'm 'the python expert' since I answer questions in the python channel a few times a week.
Doing my own work is obviously important, but I think helping other people get work done is important as well.
Just this week I introduced a guy on a totally different team to cloudformation, and in the process learned quite a bit about how they were using elastic map reduce, something we've never touched on our side of the company. He learned something, I learned something and I think the company as a whole benefits (even though I probably delayed my own work by a little bit)
It's really good at blowing up silos if you're a large-ish company. The difference in how connected I feel to the rest of the company is night and day since we switched to slack.
I don't get it. Doesn't any popular chat client fit the bill? The thing Slack adds is big persistent chat groups which doesn't help with the problem you're describing.
That's all contingent on a culture of async Slack usage, but I've found it valuable.
Also, I hate the <person> joined / left messages. There are team-related channels that are so disruptive and useless that I'd like to silently leave without being judged, but I can't.
Lastly, I've yet to be in a channel that isn't overrun by giphy spam. I know this isn't directly Slack's fault and more a company culture issue, but Slack sure makes it easy to use distracting features, whether that's integrations like giphy, or reactions to messages, etc. I think the focus needs to be less on making Slack 'fun' to use, and more on improving communication.
It allows per-team customizations, and if anyone cares to mess with it, there's a link at https://github.com/bhuga/hackable-slack-client. OSX only, but it's electron, so porting it would probably be easy.
Changing other people's applications' behavior is challenging but rewarding. The hacks required make great stories for certain kinds of parties. I always point people to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11805380 for a better introduction than I could give.
The very very weird part to me about this is that slack say they've been working on threading for at least 18 months now (https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/535121236452732928) and still can't provide a timeline for when it'll go live, which seems really odd for such a well funded development team, given it's such an oft-requested piece of functionality (there's even a twitter account dedicated to it https://twitter.com/slackThreadsYet )
If someone didn't make a new channel to discuss the idea more , and you missed the single line of text that mentioned it two hours ago.
If you happen to be looking at the right channel at the right time.
If the pertinent bits aren't lost in back scroll.
I think your statement is true for a sufficiently small company with a limited number of channels. Less so for larger companies, or even small ones with dozens or hundreds of them.
Sure they are, they just split-off into direct messages between themselves and return to the main channel to present the result of their discussion. Or don't even do that.
Information-hoarding needs a cultural fix, not a technical solution. In my experience it usually occurs in companies with a blame-culture, so people confide between themselves and keep some information undisclosed as 'insurance'.
They're fundamentally perceived by everyone (in my experience) as an extension of individual direct messages, which do trigger notifications, and yet I find myself missing these for minutes/hours at a time, sometimes when it's important, all because I've finally trained myself to ignore the non-numeric notification badge.
I've contacted the support about this and was basically told to go away. :/
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204411433-Muting-a-...
Unfortunately it didn't get the traction that I wanted. This is OK, the main purpose of the kickstarter was 'market/idea validation' to see if enough people were dissatisfied with Slack's resource usage/performance to justify building it.
If enough people here are interested though, i'd be willing to resurrect the project - please let me know.
Get it while you can.
Hail Eris
'Communication discipline' is the key issue, and it's a social issue regarding how organizations work. Some people, in some jobs, are simply rewarded for broadcasting BS. It's their job to do that. Sadly.
It's funny how much time we waste communication, and how, most often, there is very little guidance on how we should do that. Very few 'rules'.
Like typing, or 'interviewing' - there should be some effort to control this.
If you think about it - isn't it absurd that someone from some group can do something that possibly interrupts dozens of other people?
Would you allow them to shout loudly in a room?
In the Army they call it 'radio discipline'. There are specific ways to communicate. Entirely inappropriate for corporate life, at the same time, we also don't want to quash the serendipitous opportunity that sometimes arises from great chats ...
But still.
Perversely ... because Email clients usually offer finer control ... maybe email with tight discipline is the way.
I feel dirty for saying that :)