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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

Our team has become more productive since the switch to fully remote, and we use Slack all the time to facilitate our communications.

Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default. I occasionally turn on notifications for our automated system alerting Slack channel, usually when I'm not actually at my computer.

One thing I do think we do as Slack users is rely on it too much as a general information dump: even with the history, stuff gets lost. Slack is no replacement for wikis or other more static information repositories, make sure you extract valuable knowledge out and put it somewhere more suitable (and findable).

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> we use Slack all the time to facilitate our communications.

> Pro tip: set your notification settings to silent by default.

You're lucky that your company lets you treat Slack like an asynchronous e-mail inbox with multiple channels. If you have the luxury of ignoring Slack notifications until you're ready to respond, you're in a good place.

But your company isn't using Slack the normal way. The implicit expectation is that Slack is an instant messenger, and that you're expected to reply right now. That's why the default settings lean toward aggressive notifications, and that's why you need to take extra steps to turn them off.

Slack has been a powerful tool for remote work and distributed teams, but it's also an interruption factory by default. Before I left my last company, I routinely had 300-500 notification pop-ups per day as people shifted toward DMs and managers started abusing @channel to rise above the noise and get their answers ASAP.

So there are organisational differences, okay, fine. That isn't Slack's fault?

What kind of company says you have to enable notifications? That's some serious micromanagement going on. I'm sorry to hear you had to endure that.

I cannot imagine a company dictating your Slack habits. If that happens, there is something else entirely at fault and Slack is not the problem. I see Slack receiving the same type of criticism agile work methods get, they all boil down to the same type of commentary: higher management using all the tools available to micromanage the workforce for personal gains. Any tool can be misused and that most of the time is not a problem with the tool itself.

That's not an issue with the tool, that's an issue with people's usage of it.

The company could just as easily expect you to be reachable by phone or email at all times.

Is Slack extensible for an async mention/message? I know as the user you can change the notification settings for different channels, but can the sender explicitly state this message is not vital/immediate?

Create channels that are explicitly described as being for non-immediate communications and get your team to use those for that kind of conversation.

I try to create a culture where most channels are like that, and only a few channels have an expectation of urgent / immediate replies. Then I turn on notifications for all messages in those channels.

>> Create channels that are explicitly described as being for non-immediate communications and get your team to use those for that kind of conversation.

This sounds a lot like an email thread.

Not that I’ve found, and even in DnD the favicon updates making you realize someone is waiting.

I hate Slack.

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