Re:Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work
by PragmaticPulp on Monday December 14, 2020 @04:18PM
(#25423453)
> Yeah, I think of Slack as the virtual version of the open office. Anybody can bother you at any time.
Open office doesn't mean that anyone can bother you at any time. It's important that companies set expectations about these things and enforce them to avoid that slippery slope.
Same goes for Slack. Once you expand beyond intra-team communication, it's important to set some expectations for what is and is not appropriate in Slack.
At the least happy point in my career, I had to be a member of over 100 Slack channels to get my job done and I received upwards of 100-200 @here and @channel notifications every day as people competed to stand above the noise. It was miserable. At the worst point, my time tracker was counting upwards of 4 hours per day spent in the Slack app.
Ironically, my efforts to push things to e-mails and scheduled calls was met with a lot of resistance from people who were afraid it would hamper flexibility and ruin asynchronous workflows. We also had absurd levels of office politics because people were treating each other as screen names instead of actual people working in other offices. I would take an open-office floorplan over that nonsense any day.
Open office doesn't mean that anyone can bother you at any time. It's important that companies set expectations about these things and enforce them to avoid that slippery slope.
Same goes for Slack. Once you expand beyond intra-team communication, it's important to set some expectations for what is and is not appropriate in Slack.
At the least happy point in my career, I had to be a member of over 100 Slack channels to get my job done and I received upwards of 100-200 @here and @channel notifications every day as people competed to stand above the noise. It was miserable. At the worst point, my time tracker was counting upwards of 4 hours per day spent in the Slack app.
Ironically, my efforts to push things to e-mails and scheduled calls was met with a lot of resistance from people who were afraid it would hamper flexibility and ruin asynchronous workflows. We also had absurd levels of office politics because people were treating each other as screen names instead of actual people working in other offices. I would take an open-office floorplan over that nonsense any day.