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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

It's not the tools, it's how you use them. If it is an issue at your company, be truly agile and inprospect the process to improve how you use them

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The headline does a poor job at explaining the article. It’s not really focused on notifications grabbing your attention. It’s about having to cycle through multiple apps just to get your tasks done.

For example, someone asks you (on Slack) a question about a document (on Google Docs). You open the doc, but the part you need is referenced in a Jira ticket. You open Jira and it says to look at Confluence.

For all the hate that Teams gets, it does this the best. Felt this acutely when moving from Teams to Slack+Zoom+Gsuite. Open and edit docs quickly right in Teams.

But honestly the thing I miss the most is having persistent meeting chats, I don't want to create a slack channel for every ad hoc zoom meeting or having to slack someone for a link they shared on zoom I forgot to copy

Have you tried Slack's huddle feature? It entirely replaces Zoom for us now. However, Slack's screenshare capabilities are just not as robust.

Yes, this is inline with my point, it's how you use the tools, which includes how you manage knowledge and inquiries

I think that makes sense but while you can control that yourself, controlling those workflows in a company of 1000+ employees with all these tools that their disposal is a large task in and of itself.

Yup, I left a company like this because of cultural issues. Sometimes the best thing for yourself is to move on, because you cannot fix everything

A big client of mine just got a new biz development hire that is a former marine. I’ve never been in better run virtual meetings. Everything happens (and finishes) on time, expectations are properly set, and meetings are only held when necessary.

This is really interesting. Can you share a bit more about specifically how the marine achieves this? What do they say/do that achieves this outcome? Thanks!

Lots of little things, but the number one thing he did that I liked was take control of every lull in the conversation and direct everyone back to the agenda. Keeps things moving. I also liked that he would let everyone know how much time we had left at different intervals.

Thanks for replying!

I agree. For nearly 10 years I've felt that we've continued to look to "new tools" to solve our problems, always hoping/expecting that the next tool will get it right!.

When it comes to internal ticket systems, but tracking systems, internal wikis or blogs, I've long felt that each one needs a "benevolent dictator", or as I prefer to call it, a "curator".

For example, if you have an internal bug tracking system, the curator should have a custom query set up where they sort by new and keep an eye on incoming things, or look for bugs that are missing certain fields (if your system isn't configured to require them), spot-checking for duplicates, poorly written and unclear, etc... Same thing with an internal Wiki. Then reaching out and coaching and providing polite guidance.

You'll have some users who do these things well, but you'll always have some users who don't. If it's left entirely to the users and there is no curator, then things always deteriorate. Cruft builds up, things become difficult to find, and folks abandon the system in favor of the next thing, and the cycle repeats.

"We shape our tools and then our tools shape u" "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

I think it's pretty evident that tools matter in how different actions are performed. If not, what would be a point of FB a/b testing smallest things? They can get us to spend more time on their site, even though there is a given optimal that users want to spend there.

Or lets look at one extreme comparison. JIRA and SLACK. Pretend you use one and not the other. The companies communication is going to look extremely different, because these tools have "an agenda" about how users should use them

>even though there is a given optimal that users want to spend there.

Are you sure? It seems to me that the amount of time people would want to spend on a website surely depends on the website.

exactly. Just set yourself to DND and answer everything that is not sent as urgent 3x a day in bulk if you have problems otherwise.

This is not a solution, rather it's being part of the problem.

The real solution involves talking it out, revising policies, and changing behaviors

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