How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy
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Inbox zero with two keystrokes. Whoever implemented that, I'd like to buy a coffee someday.
(Also, I discovered this because I use Ctrl+Shift+ESC instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Windows Task Manager immediately without going through the intermediary screen that pops up, and one day, I missed Ctrl.)
Or other beverages, really!
If anyone's going to DEFCON this year, I'll be hanging around the Crypto & Privacy Village a lot, so feel free to say hi.
Here's an exercise. You and your coworker discussed plans for a project in a large channel 3 weeks ago. You need to get all that information and give it to someone else. How do you do it? You can't. It will be interspersed with a bunch of other nonsense from other people and isn't grouped or organized in any sane manner.
This whole "chat" in workplace thing does nothing to actually get work done.
- Face to Face: No record, even harder to give to someone
- Wiki: Goes stale pretty quickly
- E-Mail: Same problem, slower, as distracting as Slack
(Yes, I know I can build all this with ZNC, ELK or by using IRC cloud but that doesn't solve the issue about chat vs. some other system)
But that's in the past. Slack is now a company with a single purpose (chat) and they can't even do that right. Just look at the bloated "application" (browser).
We're building this at Rendevu (https://rendevu.co) and running an alpha right now, feel free to check it out.
Isn't this where the Slack search comes in? I never had the problem that I couldn't find something that I was looking for. Usually I just need one distinct word that I know was used in the conversation and a from:person filter. A feed has the same problem that it'll get too big and things will get pushed above the fold.
We try to solve that in two ways: 1. We'll intelligently bubble up stuff that has a lot of discussion or activity, along with the context, even if that activity is happening in other apps. (Lots of comments on a google doc).
2. I personally think the asynchronous nature of a feed stops people from spamming irrelevant garbage. In my experience, project channels always devolve at points to jokes/references/and stuff that people may think twice about posting to a wiki or feed.
A simple "only search in channels I am a member of and don't have muted" would go a long way towards making Slack search better. As is, I wouldn't call Slack search great or even good as I often hear from other people. I would just merely say that Slack does have search, just as a statement of fact. And then I would change the subject.
Chat is inherently a bad tool to use for planning a project across multiple days/groups. For me, it excels at casual banter, which is what most slack channels usually devolve into. The real work turns into "Can you email that?".
:/
We're building an intelligent asynchronous feed that aggregates discussions from all the other apps you already use (google / jira / trello / invision), and gives your team a one stop place to find info that doesn't go stale like a wiki.
We're running an alpha right now at https://rendevu.co. Feel free to check it out if you get the chance.
having that feature, as poorly-implemented as it is [0], ticks a box for some orgs that will keep them using slack instead of investigating other chat setups.
[0] to slack's credit, threads are (very) slowly getting (a little bit) better. My list of a dozen or so things that I hate about threads got one of the issues fixed sometime in the last few months.
Chat is great for the occasional situation where you want to have a conversation about something, you'll have a bunch of short messages back and forth, and you want to keep a record of the conversation. Putting other stuff in there just clutters things up. Slack is a great replacement for Reply All with 20 email addresses. It's not so good as a replacement for other things.
Maybe other posts devolve to that but this post is different. The common repeating pattern he's pointing out is others misusing it for low-quality communication and suggesting some settings to get some sanity back.
It's similar to previous advice about old technologies that others misuse where you had to counteract it with tactics to gain productivty. E.g. Phones - turn off ringer and manage voice mail. Email - set automatic category/priority/junk filters.
"It’s very easy to overuse DMs and see Slack as a real-time chat."
"We encourage people to be mindful about notifications. No DM is so important that it can’t wait half an hour. In fact, I see this still underused. Slack has a Do Not Disturb feature and Atlassian’s HipChat successor, Stride, made this one of its cornerstones, which they refer to a “Focus Mode.” If something is really urgent, people will call you on your phone. Everything else can wait a bit. Uninterrupted time is important — don’t let Slack take that away from you because someone is bored and asks you how your day is."
To be clear, the author does say that you should sometimes consider sending an email. My point is that the emphasis is on using Slack as something other than chat, but that's really its main use case.
I see what you mean. I think of 2 styles of "chat" ... (1) a vacuous AOL AIM or Facebook Messenger style chat or (2) a business-related channel chat.
The (1) is replicated in Slack by abuse of DMs. However, the author didn't seem to be discouraging (2). (Author wrote at the top, "but ultimately, we decided we want to keep using Slack.")
What happens is many workers bring a casual "Facebook chat" etiquette to Slack which negates how meaningful business chat can work. That's why I didn't think the author wrote contradictory advice. (Similar to how the advice to turn off the phone ringer is not contradictory to the power of voice calls -- because sometimes one needs uninterrupted time.)
I think these posts tend to emphasize that you should use Slack more like IRC. IRC is generally treated as asynchronous. Channels have tens, hundreds or thousands of people idling in them, and you can talk to those people, but you don't know when they'll talk back.
Those messages may turn into real time conversations very easily, but they don't have to.
That's also why channels are so important. You can ask a bunch of people with knowledge on the topic a question, and someone will probably respond somewhat soon. And if they take a while, you should be right there idling to receive answers even while you aren't available.
Slack conflates mentioning someone with notifying someone. Some of my coworkers use mentions like metadata. They think they are creating a better informatics resource by mentioning people by their Slack id instead of their name. They had no intention of it actually sending an immediate notification to interrupt anybody.
They see Slack more like some kind of wiki and not like a chat system. I see Slack as a chat system and an even more worthless wiki than all the other wikis everyone creates and then abandons due to editorial debt. Unfortunately, we don't get to join different Slack systems with entrance exams to filter out the wrong sort of user...
Another thing that's key in my experience is learning to take one's time in replying to people or learning who to say "no" to. When people learn that you're not 24/7 tech support, they'll bother you less often. But it really depends on the kind of company you work for, what your role is, etc.
I recently started paying for it, after having used it free at my company for several years. We wanted full comment history. I will say, the bonus of video calls doesn't work at all, and I still pay zoom.us for that. (Yes, did a customer support interaction, told them my problems, they thanked me. They have a lot of work to do. Or, they should just purchase or merge with zoom.us.)
https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-addic...
I understand your preference for face-to-face but one reason some prefer text chat is to minimize the ambient noise level in the office so as to not disturb others.
For me, one problem with face-to-face (and voice calls) is I often end up having to take notes and transcribe what the person is saying to me. Instead, if you just send me a text chat or email, it saves me the step of being your secretary to type in what you just told me.
I appreciate the sentiment, but Slack has a privacy policy and a known system for how they make money (they charge customers). Companies don’t just, on a whim, decide to start giving away data, especially when they know that it’s valuable and they have a business model of trust. Slack has this. So does basically every other corporate geared SaaS.
Being worried about data security is a real problem. That’s understandable. But companies don’t just “decide” how to use data on a whim — it’s a business after all. When you pay for a product, that direct monetary exchange is the one that firmly identifies who the product is — and it’s not you.
Their acquirers do, however.
You could make a similar argument to say you should never rent office space. Your stuff is stored in a building you don't own, and the landlord could deny you access either accidentally or deliberately. (This actually does happen sometimes with incompetence or landlord/tenant disputes.) But few people really feel like it's a big issue. In practice, most companies will rent office space without batting an eye.
I suppose one difference is there are some explicit tenant protection laws, but it still feels like a similar calculated risk thing. You outsource because the risks are low enough, trust is high enough, and the alternative of doing it yourself takes away too much from focusing on your business.
..or grant themselves access. That's the other risk that the parent comment pointed out.
> In practice, most companies will rent office space without batting an eye.
Presumably, though, they also put in security cameras and don't leave the "crown jewels" (source repo?) exclusively accessible from that office space and needing nothing more than the landlord's key to do so.
> it still feels like a similar calculated risk thing
It certainly feels like it, but is it actually? Is anyone actually even pausing to think about it, let alone calculate the risk?
> the alternative of doing it yourself takes away too much from focusing on your business
I can't help but wonder if the effort required isn't routinely over-estimated. Some of these things aren't that hard, and, when they're critical to the business, there's an argument to be made that doing it oneself is focusing on the business.
I can personally attest to repeatedly running into labor/effort over-estimation in the cloud-vs-hardware decision. This, like (at least rudimentary) chat is a well-enough understood problem that an accurate estimate is actually possible.
It's actually worse than what you described. By default, users can install integrations and applications that extend legal contract of your company to fly-by-night third parties that can obtain access to all public channels that any user of their integration is a member of. We locked this down, but most companies don't realize the legal, privacy and security risks they are accepting.
So Slack itself does not need to get hacked by anyone. The framework by design facilitates this and removes Slack from legal responsibility. Your organization takes on this legal risk and the users in your org decide your legal fate (unless you lock down integration / third party apps). I mention legal fate, as many companies are using Slack for ChatOps, automation, discussing customer issues and much more.
"We had 20 minutes notice, and then everyone was kicked out of the Slack support channel and API responses simply died."
If someone says "they would never do that" you can discard it as wishful thinking.
What happens if AWS gets hacked by Russia? Or use your stuff for their own purposes? How many people -- especially startups -- throw all their eggs in the AWS basket, rather than building a system that runs across multiple VPSes from multiple providers.
Combining your choice of Email / IM client (Gmail / Hangouts or Outlook / Skype) satisfies 99% of use cases for Slack.
Overall we were less stressed and didn't miss a beat. I'm sure there are industries / companies working in areas that it makes sense - but I don't think it just works for everyone by default in the same way that IM and Email do.
From what I can see It's pot luck which machine a message will go on The ios client is terrible There's no channels There's no history half the time (if it pops up in webmail for example), if there is, it's client based not server based
We also use irccloud and slack, they are actually useful - irccloud from a standards base, slack from an ease of use. I don't understand why people have so many problems with them.
How does Email/IM (isn't slack just IM?) solve your problems without causing the same stress?
For both cases we used Slack, I agree with your assessment in that we used Slack JUST for IM. But if you already have Hangouts / Skype, what's the marginal gain from Slack? As OP points out, initially most people start using it for IM (as this is like muscle memory) but then channels grow, get out of hand, and someone needs to input effort to cut back the entropy.
But given the effort that knowledge workers put into email management, calendars, file management, etc. that's already a lot of cognitive load on controlling information entropy on a _daily_ basis. God forbid you work in Sales or something where you're in CRMs all day, and then you need to manage clients / contacts, or a Project Manager ... shit gets heavy quick. And that's all from doing stuff _about_ work, and not really working.
Another use case that's more microscopic to me: when searching for information in archives, it's easier / less stressful to have fewer places to search for files or conversations than more. Knowing that I only need to search my emails / IM/ files (or hell - if you use Google, it's ONE SEARCH BOX in Gmail for all of them!) is a tough hurdle to get over when you're trying to sell me Slack (unless you leverage their email add-in and send most of your emails / files to Slack, but that's a hard sell for any team.)
The marginal gain is lightweight group discussion, and the ability to pull people into a conversation that's already in progress.
It actually lightens the cognitive load of which you speak by organizing information by topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security#Eavesdropping_b...
I also remember a ToS change that allowed MS to listen in for quality control purposes.
Didn't the Snowden leaks say that Skype had been used to track terrorists?
By judging their client application, I doubt the serverside looks much better, so a direct backdoor might not even be needed.
https://missiveapp.com/slack-vs-missive (detailed post, with meat)
As foreign as chat is to email, mixing them unleashes unforeseen possibilities, like directly referencing customer emails in dev chat conversations discussing feature implementation.
Making collaboration between email heavy teams (sales, support) and chat heavy teams (dev) easier.
I personally think that using a threaded based UI is more efficient to use than the infinite channel Slack offers even for chat.
e.g. Having your Github notifications grouped into different threads based on branches and pull requests all labeled with a Github label.
Whoever made the decision to use it cheaped out and didn't pay for it, so our history on channels is just getting lost, while I can still search for useful info or tips from 2 years ago on Gchat.
You can argue that this is the business model, but that is a shitty business model then. Sell features that further empower a team, don't intentionally remove one of the largest benefits of communicating in writing.
But what really pissed me for the past few months is the fact that you are unable to mute specific people. I recently had to coach a junior person, who despite being bright, fun etc. just failed to take to heart that they shouldn't interrupt someone to ask for something they could figure out themselves by looking around some, or that smiling emojis a minute after they got their answer was an additional interruption. This lack of a basic feature caused me weeks if not months of agony, making me more angry than I should be towards a person that didn't really deserve it, making me worried about my performance etc.
my company actually pays for slack but had to enable limited history, since developers kept on writing stuff that should be in wiki's or documentation in slack and relying on the search.
Of course for somebody who just comes in, this is pretty suboptimal.
just use what works, force slack to innovate
Not to set up a straw-man, but I'd imagine a similar reaction if someone wrote a post titled "How to use Facebook and not get depressed," the gut-reaction is "why use it if it's making you feel bad?"
If it had use then it wouldnt make people "crazy". It would make them happy. This inherently leads me to believe it has no use.
Personal experience, there is no golden rule to these things. Email , slack , google calendar. You eventually need to build your own relationship with these things and be adult enough to maintain that relationship (inbox at 0), seperate it from your emotions and be prepared to toss it to the side for in person conversation.
Its not slack that is making people crazy its the policies of using it at the company (or usually the lack there of) that make its benefit inconsistent. But it seems slack has not improved the situation but only exacerbated it.
I am. Not contributing to the discussion by dismissing the topic.
The project dev channels were all dead as the shop was small enough where people didn't need a bloated chat app for the few projects they managed. The one remote worker was paired with a local dev and they did all their communication via direct chat. Plus they still left access to the main random channel to ex employees so everyone could keep in touch. So there was an additional dozen people posting crap all day.
Slack was used for entertainment and distraction. I think the "modern" web chat idea is more of a distraction than help. IRC might be primitive but it does what it was made for without the distraction of gifs, memes, videos and other nonsense.
One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs.
There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many requiring expert scripting to accomplish.
Before the contract, there were a lot of teams/departments using Slack, so naturally an assortment of team workspaces started to accrue.
Once the enterprise contract came into place, those workspaces were integrated under one company banner so you can sign up with one login and join any company 'workspace'.
This means that if you need to talk to a team in a different workspace, you have to open a new tab in your browser and then join that. This is annoying, and is even worse when 'global' channels were introduced, because ANY notification gets broadcast across all the workspaces you have open.
Even DMs, if someone DMs me my Firefox tab bar lights up red across 5 different tabs.
This is partly an organisational problem in the company, but I think Slack should take some of the blame too to reduce these niggles
Or better, the day where people realize that Slack-style communication is most of the time completely useless and actually hurst productivity.
I now see that people start to realize this more and more. Slack was so much hyped a couple years ago that everyone had to use it to be cool. Now, people reflect on it and they realize that it mainly brings constant buzz and unneeded notifications. There is a use case for it, but for 99% of any serious discussion, email is usually way better.
At Rendevu (https://rendevu.co), we think that's because people are attempting to use slack for more than it is -- mainly, using it to broadcast team information (documents / decisions / faqs), that then get pushed above the fold in channels by memes / gifs / other chatter, and then have to be reposted again and again.
We're building an intelligent feed that aggregates information from the tools you already use (Gsuite / Trello / Slack), and gives your team one place to stay on top of things. It's in alpha right now, but feel free to sign in and try it at https://rendevu.co. Any feedback is much appreciated :)
Star every individual you talk to
Star channels you talk to often
Mute channels you only read occasionally
Occasionally close messages to people to clear the list.
Important things stay on the top, everything else moves to the bottom.