Inbox Ten
boz.com
boz.com
Cut to me, in my house, flipping off your Slack message. Respond, or mark as unread, don't confidently ask me to do extra, completely redundant work for you.
When someone Slacks me something that's clearly non-urgent, I just hit Save on it and come back to it later. No big deal. It's actually a wildly useful and probably underutilized feature.
Requiring others to message you _just so_ to match your own particular idiosyncrasies, because you insist on bending reality to your will rather than working in the same plane as everyone else, makes for a colleague that others dread interacting with.
Did somebody gently redirect you to email instead of Slack when you felt Slack was your medium of choice? You can always respond with, "Sorry, email doesn't work for me because [reasons], please reply here, thanks!"
Everything is a negotiation. Get good at negotiating and these issues become trivial.
Looks like the author has a similar approach.
If you don't like the office norm of Slack and wish it was email then too bad, same if it was the other way around too. It's now your problem to bridge Slack->email or email->Slack.
This is terrible woefully out-of-touch advice if the audience is anything other than executives who have enough clout to make the world move around them. If you're one of those people that is important enough that you can make everyone who wants to talk to you use your preferred communication medium then this might be actionable advice for you.
I swear we as a society didn't understand, didn't value the work administrative assistants and secretaries did (organizing all your communication being one of them) and we've been trying and failing to replace them ever since.
or risk forgetting to help you.
...or needing to scroll back through hours/days of messsges (ones that actually could be immediately answered or discussed, hopefully),
to find all the times they've agreed to help someone,
instead of you putting your (intricate, and/or technical request, from the context) into an email, ticket, or whatever you've all agreed upon.
I think that is the inflection point.
If you don't have a system in place, as an org, many people just don't think about it - find the closest, easiest text box, Send-Tweet. Or holler across the aisle of cubes at someone who is trying to concentrate...
Emphasis mine, this is literally the point I'm making but from the perspective of an office that agreed to use Slack. Which is most offices that have Slack. If email or a bug tracker is the norm then you use that, and you would be equally rude if in that situation you tried to make them Slack you instead because "you don't check email."
I know that's probably what their marketing department would like to hear, but that sounds horrific unless you're doing something quite mundane.
Which...if you're reaching out with a request time-dense enough that someone asks it be forwarded to email...it sounds like you're not doing mundane stuff.
etc
Oh, well the office also uses email. There are in fact places that use slack for time sensitive things and email for other things.
> If someone sends me a chat that isn’t time sensitive, I redirect them to email
Also, to parent and siblings: does it change your mind if you factor in that the author is CTO at Meta? Not in a simpering "ooh he's so important" way, in a practical "he gets a lot of communication and having a system helps" way.
If the CTO wants to convey the message that, in the future, such requests should come through email in the first place, it's still better to wait, then respond through Slack, and then leave a note about protocol in the future. Why is it better? Because they're leaving this note when they aren't so busy, rather than interrupting whatever they were doing to write it.
They're people. Get them out of the ivory tower!
Not to imply I have a Rolodex full of these types, but I'm on first name basis with at least three. I'm just an SRE/Architect. Whoopee!
The CTOs in my paths all have managed to exist among us peons creating that information. I find the idea of them being overwhelmed with it hilarious.
We're supposed to believe they're so busy they can't answer your question right now, but they can later - if only you ask them somewhere else? No. Ridiculous performative exercise.
Being so particular to begin with is probably why they have to be so particular.
If anything, those I've known had to go fishing for the truth! They spend/t time with people. Those layers between pose a challenge.
I guess there's some advantage in being the firefighter... the CTOs want to know the sore spots, my positions would know.
I'd be amenable if the suggestion was to post the question in the open for everyone to hear/see. Or open a ticket for a question that's really a project. Going from DM to email is simply bikeshedding.
Just a footnote, I'm a totally random person - not the original poster
Asking people to move to email feels like a passive aggressive way to add enough friction to discourage question asking.
Given the author’s net worth and close relationship with zuck, this line from the post (and the whole post honestly) is his way of telling you how he’s going to dictate communication processes. So there are lots of things that might sound reasonable or interesting but at the end of the day the author just rabidly wants to monetize you.
One technique that has gotten traction in my organization is the notion of "email bankruptcy" and "slack bankruptcy". I.e. if you find your email or slack debt getting too big to handle, you simply declare bankruptcy, archive everything (or everything older than a day or two), and start fresh. If you are very far behind, the downsides of doing this seem to be no worse than the alternatives.
When I shifted from IC engineering work to management I found that I gradually became overwhelmed with email and other comms from a lot of people who now either wanted my opinion or felt I needed to be informed about a lot of things I previously wouldn't have been involved in. Oddly, but maybe not surprisingly, I found that there was positive correlation between the size of my email backlog and how crowded my calendar was, and that the causality seemed to operate in a feedback loop. If I had too many meetings it got harder to keep up with email, and if I didn't answer emails, I got invited to more meetings. Practicing near-zero inbox actually gave me more time, instead of less.
In a work environment people will be pissed off when they have to remind you a week later about a thing they email you on.
In a personal environment you might miss an important payment and face some ugly consequence.
And I cannot think of a personal scenario where missing a single email about payment would be a catastrophic issue. The only types of payments I deal with through email would just be resolved by receiving a follow up email.
He has a sortof point which is you need to sift through the noise to get the signal. The issue is, and he's very much shielded from this, is that most places have a massive amount of noise, and its impossible to keep up.
If its my job to be the "decider" as he likes to be, and I am the top of the pyramid, then its trivial to be informed all the time.
If I have to do other things as well as this, then its hard.
At smaller companies I had an information network, which meant I was very well informed. I could, if I needed to, broker information.
At a large FAANG, and not living in the main country, that is impossible. You are reliant on third parties who you don't know personally.
I am not sure I agree with the premise that I should not expect to hear information secondhand. I find it fairly effective to have a network of well connected individuals in the org who will ping me when there is new information I need to know about. We help each other stay more disconnected (and productive) by acting as information filters/forwarders. I allow these people to have interrupt privileges for me because I know if they are sending me a notification it has been vetted for urgency
I agree that optimizing for "respond to all things promptly" could lead to what you're saying. That doesn't need to be what you're optimizing for, solely.
If being good at email brings more high value email, well, that's one of those good problems maybe. If it brings more low value email, treat the low value email differently. Or rather, treat all email as what it is.
I'm not saying there's no place at all for purposefully delayed responses.
-- Donald Knuth
People who do that go to the bottom of my "would hire again" list. I like working with people who communicate in a timely manner. Nothing wrong with replying, "I' busy today, I'll get back to you after the weekend" if you want to get off the hamster wheel of replying in a timely manner without being a jerk.
Rather, things like this serve to aggrandize. We get the information to do work. It doesn't exist alone, there's another side/counterpart. These one-dimensional things are, well, limited.
If you're there to regurgitate information, it's a communication problem - not staffing. Well, kind of - but not in a way that's favorable to you. You're neither a producer or consumer, if hoarding is your primary focus
edit: CTO for Meta, lol. How high in the clouds.
I have a private Linear project, and I use the Linear-Slack integration to create issues from non-urgent chat messages. Being in Linear means I can track and label issues and link them it to related issues in public projects.
Of course, only if "Remind me in 3 hours" isn't good enough.
I do the same thing for GitHub mentions / PR requests: They automatically open a private Linear issue, and I triage them twice a day. I try to respond during the triage process if it's a short response and if not, put a due date for later. If someone needs an urgent response (rarely), then they can Slack me to get my immediate attention.
Or make a second inbox.
This is a horrific way to live.
I can't stop thinking about this.
Is this ubiquitous anywhere? Anywhere healthy?
As someone in the middle of cold-contacting potential cofounders - how many more of you exist?
I am a sucker for super optimization. To not get sucked into these too much or take most of the points seriously I look at the role or situation they are in.
This is applicable for somebody in that situation.