It's on you to manage your interruptions (it's easy to kill them totally, or to customize what you see). If you just take it all, then yeah, I can see that being a living hell. So like, don't do that.
Some people at my company get interrupted by slack all the time, and they complain about it.
I disable all notifications except for @-mentions and DMs (and then I only have desktop notifications; mobile is disabled). If I'm expecting to not want interruptions at all, I go to DnD mode for a bit.
And yet, when I tell people this, they just somehow claim they can't do what I do for some hand-wavy reason, and continue to complain.
I definitely don’t feel pressure to answer Slack messages when I’m actively working on something, though. I imagine it’d be pretty bad if we had that kind of environment.
Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
> Having an automatic transcript of all discussion was the most amazing resource. Now I, along with everyone else, have to rely on faulty memory, which leads to more meetings to continually check that we understand each other, and longer meetings as it takes a lot longer to convey ideas. Quite frankly, it is a disaster, in my opinion.
> But perhaps in both of our cases we are simply resistant to change.
Voice chat is almost always faster for me as it is easier to have a discussion and potentially whiteboard. If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
Where I find the opposite. The ability to stop and craft a message that is precise gets the job done immediately, rather than the continual back and forth to confirm that each party understands what happens to be uttered in the moment that is inherit to voice chat.
> If people aren't taking notes during meetings (or snapping a quick photo of a whiteboard drawing) that doesn't sound like a communication problem but a personal one.
A personal one shared by everyone, I guess. Meeting length and frequency has increased substantially. And not only the meetings that I personally take part in, but observed company-wide.
I imagine familiarity is key. If you come from an environment where voice communication is the de facto method, you are going to get good at that style of communication through practice, and then anything else is going to seem less performant. In my case, we spent many years conducting textual communication and gained plenty of practice at it. Now, voice communication is the unfamiliar ground.
Don't use the application versions of any of your apps. Instead, open up the web version of all of them and keep all their tabs in one browser window.
For example, my "notification window" includes my gmail, slack, outlook, and the web client for my mobile texts. I keep the window minimized until I have a need for it, and keep the vibration off on my phone during work hours.
We were pretty invested in ChatOps which I thought was great. Being able to issue commands in any sort of war room situation with a group of people was definitely helpful for that sort of triaging. Of course, the downside being that depending on Slack to be up to do effective operations isn't super appealing to me.
Of course people have been doing this with IRC forever, but Slack is a definite improvement on this front over Skype.
Before there was always someone moving around to talk to someone else or internal E-Mails which are equally bad.
We use slack sparingly and only have a few channels with many people. Most things happen in private channels. We always "idle-ping" other team members first and do not expect an immediate response.
The result is a much calmer office. People move around less and there is less chatter. And we still have the option to use group chat if required.
We even added a channel where new commit messages are automatically posted. A wonderful thing to keep informed about what's going on and you can take immediate action if you see something strange.
I think this all falls apart if our team size would increase. But I believe for teams with less than 25 people slack is perfectly fine. Above that size notifications probably start to be annoying.
No matter your concerns about Slack, once you’re in a company using it you have no choice but to embed yourself completely.