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I agree Slack can be used effectively, but I don’t think its design encourages it. It encourages massive distraction — more active user time — by its default client and organization level settings.

Nor do I think this is as simple as “you can simply exit the program.” If the company or team has certain expectations on communication that won’t work if you do it without consulting with your team. A lot of people are not in this sort of position where they can take an action like that and not be ostracized.

Imagine ignoring calls or emails from your boss for a day or two when it’s clear that boss expects responses in a specific time? Exiting Slack can have the same effect at a lot of companies.

I simply think more companies need to take the time to discuss how tools will be used and for what purposes so everyone is on the same page. We have always published an etiquette guide that is open for debate/change. But most places I’ve worked use Slack and most places simply don’t discuss how it’s used so everyone has different expectations. And being the one person trying to fix this problem in a team can make you feel crazy.

If your company wants you to sit on Slack all day and not do "deep work" the that's on then, and if it's a waste of your time then it will be their wasted money. So the companies are just as invested in this as employees are.

You also need to make sure you're doing the right "deep work". Sometimes, the problem was already solved by someone else, and there Slack can mean the difference between discovering that in a few minutes vs. a few days.

It not an even trade. 'The company' is merely wasting (often someone else's) money. You on the other hand are wasting your own life-time.

Whether or not Slack encourages workflows (and I can see how it would), I think in order to be an effective human in the modern era _requires_ thinking critically about technology choices and how to use them. Cal Newport's new book Digital Minimalism was a great read about this - be intentional about your tech choices, and be intentional about when and how you use them. Otherwise it's super easy to just get sucked into spending all day wasting time on the most distracting and addicting sites. Company culture can be shaped (though it's definitely hard when you are on the bottom of the hierachy).

I completely agree, but I don't think that means we should ignore or withhold criticism when a company like Slack has immense power over how other companies operate. We should be scrutinizing the decisions they make because it does affect us.

Many of these decisions you refer to are not made by the individual employee, but by the team lead, PM, or the executives, who are not always very connected to how those decisions affect developer happiness. So getting control of your personal digital life often has no bearing once you enter the workplace with an entirely different set of expectations.

Slack being a public company worries me even more, because there is now an even greater drive for them to make ever-increasing revenue/profits, which usually means keeping people on Slack and active within the client and increasing daily active user / engagement metrics. In many ways there isn't great alignment between a company being productive and Slack's financials; Slack is incentivized to boost revenue even more now, likely at the expense of end-user productivity.

Absolutely, I see two avenues of attack. As an individual, I see that Slack exists and is widely used in tech. I can't really say no to using them, but I can do what I can to protect myself. If a company requires bad online hygiene, that's certainly a difficult problem.

On the broader level, I definitely think the larger the company and the larger influence it has, the more scrutiny it needs. People who are in charge need to recognize the externalities of what they are making, and the potential negative side effects they can have. I have been somewhat encouraged at least in that this conversation seems to be happening lately.

Good point about choices being lead by executives in distance. I once had a client CEO obsessed with slack because he had developed a Pavlovian association between Slack knocks (upon got commits) and product delivery. He wanted to hear more and more knocks and people started to commit more and more often with increasingly trivial deltas.

But slack isn't supported by ads is it? Why would investors care about increasing engagement/screen time?

I would think they would care more about adoption of the service across more kinds of companies.

> Imagine ignoring calls or emails from your boss for a day or two when it’s clear that boss expects responses in a specific time?

Then slack makes no difference then, you might as well blame emails or the phone company.

I would add to this, Slack can be a fantastic tool or it can be the bane of your workday, it all comes down to how your company/team use Slack.

On my team almost everything goes into the main team chat; however, every message is tagged with the person it's aimed at and any team-wide communication is tagged @here. Any sub-conversation about that top-level message happens in the message thread.

With this method, you are only notified if you are tagged in a message or if a message is tagged @here. Outside of that I will check slack about once per hour and can see all top-level issues at a glance that either my team or a specific person has been notified of. If I am interested in whatever the issue is I can dive into the thread and get more information about the issue or contribute my 0.02.

I see many here suggesting other software, at the end of the day that's all it is, software. The productivity drain/boost comes down to how everyone decides to use that software. If you get 100 emails a day with the subject "IMPORTANT: READ IMMEDIATELY", email suddenly becomes just as annoying and as much of a time-suck as Slack, this applies to all communication methods.

I mute at here in all channels. It should be banned.

It's easily the most misused feature of Slack.

Using @here in a channel is the equivalent of standing on your desk and shouting at everyone around you. So what happens is, like you, everyone starts muting it.

And then you just have people shouting into the void.

I think you should rules about it at the workplace. At mine, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've seen an @here. And one of them, the person was told he shouldn't have done it since it wasn't important. Really makes everything think before they use it.

We use separate channels for different projects and people join/leave as needed. @here is incredibly useful when you have a general question and not sure who might have insight.

It all boils down to how people use the communications channel. I see @here multiple times a week but do not feel like it is a big distraction. At worst it can create a few minutes of distraction from my current workflow and if I'm truly in the middle of a thought process I ignore the message for a little bit or unless a 2nd notification hits.

Can you explain what you think is correct slack etiquette?

Never @ someone unless you want their immediate attention?

This sounds like it would be a better workflow for a threaded newsgroup style application.

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.

Yep, this is exactly how I use it at my office. Slack isn't where 'deep work' happens, it's one of the things that allows me to accomplish 'deep work' by reducing interruption and distraction.

Exactly. Take pride in being that person who is so busy/focused that you can't be bothered to respond instantly to every discussion. Slowly train others to understand this working style.

> If a person can't work because of a pending question, it usually means they don't have their work organised sufficiently.

This is an overly harsh assumption. There are plenty of compelling real-world examples of organized, effective people being blocked by some small but urgent thing that's not their fault and requires a few minutes of attention from someone else.

If a dev just started on my project but the DB credentials I gave him aren't working (or whatever), that's on me. If my boss's boss jogs over to our office area asking who here knows Thing_X the best, I'm going to deign to remove my noise-cancelling headphones and accept the deep-work disruption.

True, I'm a bit harsh on this, but I also used the word usually instead of always on purpose. Yes, sometimes someone can really get blocked and not able to work, no problem to ask for help in this case. On the other hand I have seen it enough times that people (especially juniors and bosses) continuously ask question without having bothered to think about it prior. Forcing them to deal with a problem by themselves for a bit and not distract others has resolved many of them.

The key thing is being clear what communication and team culture you want to establish. I'm not just a grumpy guy that ignores messages or avoid helping others. It is something that has been discussed and agreed upon in the company and is expected to be respected by anyone no matter where the person is in the hierarchy.

Fair enough: I agree that plenty of people prematurely ask someone rather than try to figure out a solution by searching, thinking, experimenting, etc., and using Slack as an asynchronous channel will generally encourage people to hack a bit more at their problem before instinctively distracting the person next to them.

> You can always just exit the program.

Or never start to use it in the first place.

The fundamental problem with Slack is that its interactions are not structure in the right way to be useful in non-real-time. An email thread has two critical pieces of structure that Slack threads lack: a subject line, and a beginning. With email, it's easy to tell where a particular discussion started, and which messages have to do with that discussion. On Slack, these things are all intertwingled. In order to find the beginning of a discussion you have to scan everything in the channel. That is what makes Slack a distraction. It's much harder (like virtually impossible) to filter content by topic after the fact.

I'd argue that they all have their place. Anything of great length that's related to something product wise that has impact should be discussed in an epic or ticket that links the main point back.

As anyone who's followed a giant email chain, I think that slack is at-least a little bit easier to follow. Albeit I'm working in a company that is just now trying to start to emphasize stories/tickets/chat over email for everything, with tons of pushback.

Gone are the days of email everything, tons of people are CC'd, email chains are 30-50 responses in. It's absolutely unmanageable. Oh and if you drop chat, let's start logging alerts to email, or bugs to email. It's useless.

Personally I'll use chat for anything relatively quick or unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I'll use email for when it's not something that requires a response right away but generally is also unimportant to the company projects and doesn't involve a ton of collaboration. Anything bigger than that goes in a system that's suitable for tracking projects or complicated topics.

I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for communication.

It's possible to have structured conversations by always using threads.

I've convinced everyone at two companies so far (50 and 20 people) to never reply directly in a channel, and always use threads:

https://medium.com/@martinkonicek/how-to-slack-6f5bf9be71ba

How do I get my coworkers to do that?

One way would be to share the article with them and explain that replies directly in a channel make it harder for you to catch up. Saying that threads make it easier and quicker for you to decide what to read.

I usually start by proposing an idea to a small group of people - e.g. my team or people at the company I think might like the idea. Only after a few people say they like the idea and start using threads, propose the idea to more people and say "look, a few of us are using threads and it works".

> I specifically don't want to be called/texted/interrupted in person unless it's something severely important. 90% of the time its not. I would much rather ignore a slack notification than answer a meaningless phonecall, or politely tell someone to bug off in person.

This a million times

Bonus points, you don't annoy other people in the office with your impromptu meeting next to someone that has nothing to do with it

I agree. As a remote freelancer, I'm currently in (checks the app) 5 Slacks. I have explicitly told everyone in each of those Slacks that I treat it as async only. I sometimes have it up, and sometimes don't when I'm cranking. I definitely don't have push notifications coming into anything.

I've found being in Slack is a great way to feel less isolated, and conversations that might not otherwise happen happen. I also am in very small channels, usually no more than 5 people. This may contribute to why I like it. I can't imagine being in a 50-100 person Slack with everyone messaging everyone. Especially if I'm expected to keep up. The low population count makes it so that I rarely miss anything.

Slack can be a terrible tool if you let it, but it can be wonderful, too, if you tune your notifications, and use DnD when you need it. Also, schedule DnD for non-work hours so you are never bothered outside of work hours, unless there is a true emergency (and if you work at a place with a lot of emergencies, then you have a shitty workplace).

It's a tool. Use the tool, don't let the tool use you.

Slack is hostile to users and panders to management. It's a sound business strategy. I can't trust the platform, I'll always be second class.

What about scheduled DnD for days off? Ability to /ignore annoying bots? Two basic features which should've been added long ago.

Those features plus the ability to ignore @here from only certain users would make a huge difference.

Slack is hostile to users and panders to management. It's a sound business strategy. I can't trust the platform, I'll always be second class.

That is very vague. Sounds like you have an axe to grind with your management.

What about scheduled DnD for days off? Ability to /ignore annoying bots? Two basic features which should've been added long ago.

Good feature idea. Have you submitted them?

As for as DnD scheduling for PTO, they have custom which I use on my last day. Works perfectly for me.

As for /ignore for bots, sounds like the people controlling your Slack need a suggestion or two.

DnD scheduling for Sat/Sun.

> You can always just exit the program.

No, you can't, and that is the problem. If your entire team primarily uses Slack to communicate, you are forced to constantly check it or you are not being a team player.

The article explicitly says they chose asynchronous by default -- which I interpret to mean that you switch off those notifications and make slack poll-only.

You talk about searching the history but to me the search tools are so weak that I figure only the recent slack messages have relevance -- instead slack is as transient as a text message. Mail at least can be searched as a corpus.

Searching for old messages has always worked fine for me

I use Sococo for this. It has an expanded interface to increase awareness of group activity - who's talking with whom, has the meeting started, is anybody still in the office.