Our Week Without Slack
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
Why yes, of course you need to restrain yourself from chatting all day. And learn to ignore people or tell them you're not able to talk to them right now - but it can still be immensely helpful to have your network of people available to help you solve your problems - because you're also helping them solve their problems from time to time.
I do think that the Slack homes for user groups and open source projects (the ones set up with auto-invite on Heroku) are direct replacements for "join us on Freenode" invitations.
We've got customers that are doing tens and hundreds of thousands of chats per day across their organizations.
Is it really so surprising?
> "The longest I can go without checking it even if I'm incredibly busy is probably 10-15 minutes."
Well... don't? Maybe close the app?
Our team is 100% remote and we use Slack and email constantly, but when somebody needs to finish some urgent task, we just close it, no big deal. Is having a bit of privacy and piece of mind frowned upon now?
I may be completely off base here, but I'm assuming that most Slack teams probably don't have products whose entire development cycle is only a few hours in many cases. Just my theory, maybe I'm a psycho with a short attention span, but I really don't think that's the case.
However, I assume you did manage to work before Slack existed, right? I'm not saying this sarcastically. We sometimes forget that there are many different ways to produce the same result. You can perfectly use it less.
It should provide value; if it doesn't, reduce its usage.
> That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this
I always think of this quote when one of these dilemmas hits me: "You are not as important as you think you are". You think you need input or to contribute constantly, but that's not usually the case. Slow down on your communication, it's fine. Don't check Slack every 15 minutes when you're writing, check it less often. Easier said than done :)
I think they have bigger fish to fry here.
Slack has a mute button. All that requires is self control. You can't mute coworkers sitting too close to you. Even with headphones (which notice half the people in the photo are wearing) you can only somewhat filter out the distracting people.
Secondly, messages piling up is a feature, not a bug. You engage when you need a mental break and you're in an engagement mood. If other people are in that mood at the same time, great. If not, then if you force them to engage with you anyway you are harming their productivity. People need to learn this. People get in the zone at different times and this needs to be respected.
I think thats where we need to focus.
The guys should be applauded for having been able to recognize the problem and taking control [or at least making serious attempt to] over their dopamine addiction.
Many comments here are equivalent to "drink responsibly". Well, one can do it if one can ... otherwise cutting it off is a pretty sensible thing to do.
Group chat adds tangible value to work when used responsibly. You can create a cultural requirement that minimizes interruptions by consigning random chit chat or idle questions to IMs that can be safely ignored for a time by muting notifications.
When, "hey which internal CMS has this thing I need?" is an IM I can safely mute when I need to focus instead of a productivity-destroying shoulder tap, that is significant.
If they were experiencing a dopamine addiction because they couldn't learn how to properly contextualize and ignore notifications when they needed to be in the zone, that's on them, not the tool.
many creative people worked or were inspired "under influence" of various stuff causing addiction.
>Group chat adds tangible value to work when used responsibly.
some claim so. Well, for example cigarettes or a glass of wine help too - by calming down. Wine is also great for heart and blood vessels. And meth (ADHD drugs) is very useful for increasing concentration and productivity even for healthy people. They give it to [healthy] pilots for example.
>If they were experiencing a dopamine addiction because they couldn't learn how to properly contextualize and ignore notifications when they needed to be in the zone, that's on them, not the tool.
Blame (internal and external) is a typical trap of addiction. The way out is to understand what it isn't about blame, it is about what to do. Honestly accepting your weakness if you can't manage addiction and go sober completely.
To bring all this back into context, Slack has a mute button. You can't mute the physically addictive qualities of drug addictions. This is a completely bizarre comparison.
Equally absurd is your equating the tangible productivity benefits of group chat software (minimizing distractions through asynchronous communication) in an office culture to the oft-cited but scientifically questionable benefits of using drugs to be more creative.
Even if you could prove that getting addicted to drugs makes you more creative through some sort of peer reviewed scientific study (is studying that in a controlled way even ethical?), I doubt anyone would argue that the tradeoffs were worth it because of the powerfully negative consequences of drug addictions.
And, once again, the analogy is absurd because the productivity benefits of using group chat are clearly less ambiguous and the risk of "dopamine addiction" is entirely optional with judicious use of that mute button.
And, frankly, as someone who knows multiple people struggling with drug addictions right now, I find the comparison offensive. No one's life will ever be destroyed by Slack the way I've seen people's lives being destroyed by alcohol and drugs.
Cigarettes also considered an addiction. I smoked from 1992 to 2002. I have never felt a cigarette craving as strong as those impulses to check email, this HN forum, etc... I quit smoking yet i'm pretty much slave to the internet communication habit and fighting hard to control it.
I mute every single channel I'm in (30+) and just check Slack once at the beginning of the day and once at the end of the day. I still get notifications for @messages and respond if necessary.
I would love to have more control over what kinds of auditory and visual notifications can appear when away or not away and be able to specify what can trigger them. Which right now slack is very limiting on those kinds of settings.
Sure the icon still updates, but it's invisible until you look at it.
Only surprise was in the presentation where I forgot Adrianne was the writer as I read content first followed by author. Gets me to the goods plus eliminates various biases. I thought, "What a bizarre response to a question about how Slack worked for their organization. Is this person trolling the feedback form?" Lol.
Anyway, I think it was a nice reminder that it's best to make interviewer's questions stand out from the answers. A good, design pattern. One I recall was, before Q&A begins, to say something like "interviewer's questions in (color here)" with the rest a different color. I figured it out by the second statement with that name that I was reading the interview questions but it mentally interrupted flow in an otherwise good presentation. So, still worth mentioning and trying to avoid in the future.
Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
For devs, it is just too much noise to have any reasonable conversation: maybe because writing emails ensures that writer/sender thinks more about what to write in email. Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development).
We tried using for checkins and build statuses but web page seems a better way.
Just way too distracting.. but maybe we are missing the use case.
Nailed it.
That's the thing I'd like to have in our chat - a way to mark a message as "not urgent" (or vice-versa), so that it doesn't interrupt their work. Usually I just end up emailing them, but that just adds a bunch of friction to both sides, and even then some of my colleagues are expected to reply to emails with little delay, since they handle client support.
On IRC one can configure the client to alert the users only when the message matches certain terms, but we use Hangouts :|
Surely there should not be too much computational overhead involved here or am I missing something?
On the other hand, from their picture, it appears that all their people are in the same room. They don't really need an online system for this.
Best thing about slack for me is that it's an interface to send alerts/reminders/metrics to my team and I, but I'm one of those people who loathe email.
Exaggeration aside, how do you guys get anything done?
Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn't necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age.
There's a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for their actions, but other people's actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.
It's like going on a diet and deciding not to have any junk food in the house rather than have it around and force yourself to be disciplined.
An entirely valid (and correct) approach.