
Unslacking Tideways Company - beberlei
https://beberlei.de/2018/10/28/unslacking_tideways_company.html
======
sdan
Definitely agree with your decision.

After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our
productively increased.

No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in
the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose
to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger).

However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.slack.com where many
hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware project. Slack
is easily accessible for anyone to ask questions and with proper use, I was
pretty productive in communicating effectively across channels.

Despite this, I believe that slack in general is a waste of time in a TEAM.
Why not have meetings or meet up in real life rather than hiding behind a
screen without any physical interaction? Slack, however, is a great
alternative for forums since there is great searching capabilities within
channels and there's always someone there to help.

~~~
andybak
> where many hobbists come in and have questions on this software/hardware
> project

I'm rather baffled by the use of chat for this kind of problem. (and I never
clicked with IRC either)

So - I've got a problem and I come to a chat channel. It's probably been asked
before. If I'm lucky I'll find my answer in a searchable chat archive and I
won't need to visit at all. Otherwise I face two options:

1\. Scroll back and try and find any previous mentions. Nearly impossible in
my experience.

2\. Ask my question and hope that people aren't sick of hearing it. If I'm
lucky enough that a) someone is present who knows the answer and b) they
respond in a timely manner then I still face the problem that - assuming it's
busy enough for a and b to be likely - then my conversation is interspersed
with several unrelated discussions. Also - the person helping me is likely to
go quiet for long periods or disappear altogether because most probably _they
are doing other stuff_.

Note that the final flaw (the interleaving of discussions) is a problem in all
cases.

Now - can someone explain to me how this is better than a forum or Stack
Overflow style site?

~~~
lmm
1\. Those interleaved discussions are what makes it a worthwhile hangout for
experienced users.

2\. Conversely, they also mean that maybe you'll help someone else out while
you're waiting.

3\. It's easier to diagnose a problem in an informal back-and-forth than in
the writing-for-posterity style that SO and fora encourage.

~~~
stedaniels
Chat might be ok for facilitating diagnosis, but when I'm searching for help I
want an SO style answer. Bear in mind I've been doing IRC for a couple of
decades, so it's not lack of experience.

~~~
lmm
Many people looking for help aren't up to asking an SO style question.

------
Waterluvian
When I was at a fully local company, slack was good for conversations where a
few people might be actively discussing an issue and then I could come in
hours later and skim the history, if it was a channel I felt relevant to be
aware of.

But slack was also super easy to use wrongly and drain so much time into. It
really helped to declare slack a lossy source of comms. You shall not expect
people to read it and you shall not use it as a data store. Important things
go into email, wiki, tickets.

On a fully remote team, slack is so important, but all the same rules need to
apply.

~~~
gregmac
Almost agree, but email should also be treated as lossy.

It drives me crazy when people send mass company emails with, for example, new
policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere. New hires only see
them if someone remembers they exist and forwards them, plus it's impossible
to figure out current state without spending a bunch of time playing email
archeologist.

~~~
personjerry
Email is generally regarded as the most reliable in my experience.

~~~
rabidrat
To the parent's point, how do you get a future employee to receive the
information in an email that was sent before they started?

~~~
personjerry
You include it in their onboarding

~~~
rabidrat
So now you have to store each email that includes important information in a
second place, so that you remember to include it in their onboarding. Why not
just post it to the intranet in a well-known location in the first place?

~~~
addicted
Ideally the information goes where it’s supposed to in your permanent
knowledge repo. This could be a wiki, a website, etc.

The email is sent as a notification that the content has been added, updated
or moved.

Email should ideally serve as a notification system and a lossy communication
system where things you want to retain need to be backed up somewhere else.

The nice thing wth email is that being an open eco system there are a lot of
integrations that are supported easily.

~~~
rabidrat
Right. But too often, as gregmac said, "people send mass company emails with,
for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere".
Email should be used for notification and ephemeral communication, and not for
information dissemination. In that way it's the same as chat.

------
stupidbird
Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day
collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to
be referencing a chat from 3 years ago?

We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the
forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.

~~~
john_oshea
Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)

~~~
gilbetron
Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating
a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I
used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a
number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to
try.

I'm curious why people _don 't_ like forums for discussions.

~~~
dsr_
Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet.

Proper threading.

Read/Unread tracking.

Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.)

Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.)

Killfiles.

They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible
to Google.

These are off the top of my head.

~~~
tomp
Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except
Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being
present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.

~~~
howard941
Sorry, no native point system. You can bolt on something NoCeM-like, server or
newsreader based, and enjoy distributing article reputation right now. But it
supplies only a show/no show signal out of the box. I think the cancelmoose
would have preferred it to be somehow more nuanced and only live in
newsreaders...

[http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/](http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/)

[https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-
nocem/](https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/)

[https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose)

------
AkshatM
I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack.

If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not
Disturb option to snooze notifications.

If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize
discussion around an issue to a single place.

If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack -
have you considered segregating your alerts into specific channels and muting
those you don't care about? (Alerts are a bad example, though - really, you
should use Slack for a visibility record during an incident, but the only
alerts you should care about should bother you with PagerDuty or OpsGenie - if
they're important, they should bother you).

I do work for a larger company (some 400 employees) and we use Slack quite
effectively. One thing that's really helped us is that, by consensus, we don't
make decisions in Slack - everything of actual import should have a ticket to
condense everything in. Slack becomes useful for us if we need immediate
assistance, have questions or need to communicate in real time during an
incident. It's also invaluable when you have remote employees (!).

~~~
beberlei
Hey, these all sound like very good hints on how to use Slack, especially the
consensus on decision making. Maybe we have used Slack wrong, but especially
the context was important for me and Slack threads are hard to enforce, you
can "break out of the jail" easily, often by mistake.

~~~
duskwuff
> Slack threads are hard to enforce, you can "break out of the jail" easily,
> often by mistake.

In particular, image uploads (and possibly other attachments?) are always
posted to the main channel, even if the message they were attached to was in a
thread. Trying to conduct an image-heavy discussion -- like a discussion about
a graphical design -- in a thread will just mean the main chat gets
interrupted by a bunch of out-of-context images.

~~~
johannes1234321
This was improved over recent months by Slack.

------
sandGorgon
> _If you wait for a long time to reply to a message on chat, then the
> discussion thread is already spread in the history of the chat room and
> messages back and forth interleaved with many additional messages that are
> not related is not helpful._

Use zulip - [https://zulipchat.com](https://zulipchat.com) . Opensource.
Designed for threaded context.

~~~
cortesoft
I mean,slack has threads, too.

~~~
vishnu_ks
Yeah. But threads in Slack are secondary and are mostly meant for having
conversations that people don't care about. Zulip has a much superior
threading model. Each and every conversation is a new thread and has a topic.
This model makes it extremely easier to catch up and participate in
conversations.

[https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/](https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/)

------
dvtrn
_Slack makes this very difficult and at least for me, is a primary cause of
anxiety and fear of missing out_

I unironically wonder how widespread this problem is among the specific group
of people who blame their lack of productivity on Slack, or failing that, how
many people would admit their FOMO is _enhanced_ by chat apps.

So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about
with Slack aren't really issues with slack, but human issues with boundaries
of what we allow to take our attention not being defined, and ultimately, yes:
FOMO. Things are going to get missed, you're going to come in late to certain
conversations, but I often wonder do you _need_ to be on the bleeding edge of
these talks if they don't directly relate to you or even reside in the
periphery of your responsibility radius?

Probably not, I would wager-but tl;dr very rarely does it seem like Slack is
the cause of productivity problems, it just seems the convenient scapegoat.
Especially since:

" _work never happens in a vacuum_ " (FTA) is a statement that in my opinion,
cuts both ways.

~~~
jedberg
> So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about
> with Slack aren't really issues with slack,

They're not specific to Slack, but they are specific to the existence of an
official real time chat app. The boss expects you to read the chat, and if you
just ignore it, you'll get in trouble and be deemed "irresponsible" if you
aren't acting on it and participating in it.

~~~
lunchables
I think this implicit assumption of how to use Slack is the problem. The only
thing that we expect someone to respond to on Slack is an @ or a dm. Anything
else is analogous to a conversation that happened in a room you either weren't
in, or had your headphones on. An @ is like someone walking over and tapping
you and asking you to take your headphones off and join the conversation and a
dm is like walking into your office and asking you something.

------
a13n
Check out Twist. [https://twist.com](https://twist.com)

I have no affiliation with the company/team, but love the product so much that
I want to share it here!

The whole idea behind Twist is to be a team communication that doesn't have
the productivity issues Slack does. I think it's a very well positioned and
timed product.

We've been using it for months at our startup, Canny. Threads are a useful
level of organization, such that it's always easy to find what I'm looking
for. However, I don't feel like I need to check it constantly.

~~~
beberlei
Author here. We tried Twist a while ago and it looked great, especially as you
mentioned the Threads. But at the time had performance problems with larger
threads and the REST API was very complicated to add simple posts. We didn't
try it again afterwards. We use Basecamp now, and it has a forum and threads
as well per team or project.

------
ishan_chhabra
> I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on
> a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult.

I have personally suffered from this far too long, specially when my work has
been a hybrid of maker and manager. It becomes extremely hard to create
pockets of maker time.

My solution has been to schedule 2-3 hour blocks of focused time around a
project (Feature X) or responsibility (customer support) once or twice a day
so that at the very least, I can create focus during those times. The key is
to not over do it and get hung up on scheduling every minute, but just a few
hours per day like this.

To facilitate this, I've built a slack bot that integrates with my calendar
and I can mark these events as "Focus" events. The bot sets my status to "Do
Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a
message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they
were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and
I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of
notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one.

Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal
communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email
for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the
times when you need it.

You can try out the slack bot at
[https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv](https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv)

In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend
to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not
very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in
using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.

------
village-idiot
I know everyone has their own take on why slack is bad. From the interruption
factor to Electron using all their memory. For me, the issue is that it gives
teams a false sense about their tech debt.

In every case I've seen, Slack slowly replaces persistent documentation. Every
issue one runs into can be resolved with a quick @here to the proper channel,
or a DM to the tamer of Eldritch horrors (every company has one). This reduces
the incentive to eliminate footguns or properly document everything, because
look at us being all collaborative and solving problems together!

The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time
someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread
information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information.

~~~
tomjakubowski
> The smell for this behavior is having to search Slack for that last time
> someone helped you solve your problem. Slack is a great way to spread
> information, but it's a terrible tool to organize and store information.

If you ever have to do this, you take it as a sign to transfer that
information into a document somewhere.

~~~
village-idiot
A good plan, for certain. In my experience very very few people follow this
advice, myself definitely included.

------
amirathi
There's a great opportunity for someone to build a team communication tool
that's more forum-centric than channel-centric. Let me explain the core
problem with slack (or any channel-centric chat).

When I join a wide slack channel (e.g. #Design), I'm not interested in half a
dozen different threads of communication happening on it everyday. But there
might be couple of discussions per week that are pertinent and important for
me to do my job well. There's NO way to ignore 90% of non-pertinent
conversations without actually reading all the messages on the channel
(yikes!).

------
czardoz
Personally, I really like Slack. It's just really useful as a centralized
communication place, especially since it integrates with almost every SaaS
platform under the sun.

I guess it's not suitable for every team though.

~~~
stephengillie
I've only ever seen Slack in 1 of 2 modes:

\- Dozens of people in every room having multiple conversations, and any
comment you make is quickly lost in the flow of other discussions.

\- Ghost town.

~~~
metamet
We use Slack and don't have either of those environments.

I suppose we make heavy use to group DM's and project specific channels, but
it really helps us keep communication streamlined and direct.

We don't really use email. If we need to ping someone on a PR review, it's
done in Slack. If one of our systems is having issues, it's automated through
a specific Slack channel.

~~~
stephengillie
How much planning, training, and other efforts does your company put into
mainlining group DMs and team channels?

------
Kaveren
Some form of communication that's reasonable to be real-time is important.
Slack is one of the better options for this.

It makes much more sense to change the expectations / culture surrounding
Slack usage at a company than to drop it outright.

You can use Slack and related applications for asynchronous communication in
direct messages. On the other hand, I don't want to have to wait multiple
hours for a reply when I only need a quick clarification in regards to a
previous e-mail.

I don't want to waste my time with e-mail, and I don't think it's a better
alternative.

There is real value in Slack and programs like it, and you give that up when
you _only_ use e-mail and GitHub issues and such. This is better if you have
no one working remote, but it's far from ideal. Besides, if I had an office
job I could ignore Slack messages. I couldn't ignore someone walking up and
interrupting me in-person.

~~~
goatherders
What's wrong with the phone as a real-time communication tool?

~~~
Kaveren
1\. I can't easily go and look back at everything that was said in a call.
Notes are not a replacement for this.

2\. Phone calls are _too_ real-time, to the point where you can't manage
multiple separate phone calls near the same time or do something else if a
phonecall only requires some attention.

Calls have their place, but I don't think they're a replacement for written
communication.

------
hunta2097
If _only_ Slack was the only source of interruptions!

The more responsibility you gain, the more interruptions you get. I have to
make a conscious effort to ignore people for a few hours in order to get into
a "flow" these days.

This can lead to some friction but I can't think of another way around the
problem.

------
jahaja
I find it hard to follow these kind of no-chat articles since they usually
come off as a bit contrarian rather than something that makes sense:

* Why does a _chat blackout_ naturally follow a fear of missing out?

* What's different from the good ol' IRC days? Mute the channels, see them as transient, and focus on 1on1 conversations.

* Important conversations should not be solely communicated through a short-lived channel chat, but be summarized through email or whatever.

* You're already missing out on all the 1on1 conversations you're not in.

And I write this as someone who chronically checks for slack updates.

Maybe the "fear of missing out" isn't really about missing out on important
information, as I initially thought, but about missing out on _participation_
and the inevitable social/office dynamics around that?

~~~
beberlei
Author here.

I have never used IRC in a company, so I can't compare. Slack is the topic,
because we used Slack. If we have had used IRC or HipChat or Microsoft Teams,
then maybe we have come to the same conclusion.

Yes, summarization is important. However switching to E-Mail causes all its
problems. New colleagues don't have the mails for example. Basecamp has chat
and a forum/message board or todolists. We can easily link between these.

------
orliesaurus
Well Slack might have not worked for you. It doesn't work for everyone!
Probably it works the worst for devs? Here is a story. I was working with a
team of couple people located in different corners of the city. Everyone is
remote except two who share an office. Up until a month ago everything was
done over email. Sometimes you would send an email and get a reply in minutes,
other times after hours. This was highly inefficient, to the point where I
would call people to ask them to open emails... Guess what happened since we
installed Slack and a couple of general open channels?

~~~
buckminster
Why can't you do something else while you're waiting?

~~~
orliesaurus
You can, but the thing is that unlike with emails, with Slack most
conversation happen in public and no one has to CC you in email (or rather
remember to CC you in these convos) basically slack replaces CC and BCC part
of the email really well

------
swalsh
Good luck finding out about free food in the office without Slack.

~~~
stephengillie
My coworkers go out of their way to tell each other, in person, about the free
food.

------
jedberg
Even in my company with just two people I could already see us making bad
Slack habits. Things that should be in email/google groups/basecamp were
showing up in Slack.

I still have Slack, mainly because I like the #github channel that has all the
GitHub activity, and the #industrynews channel, which has a bunch of RSS feeds
of industry specific news. But those could be easily replaced with google
groups/basecamp too.

Maybe I will just shut down the Slack...

------
artursapek
In addition to the points in this article, I've also found real-time chat is
much less efficient for deep discussions than email or voice. For some reason,
people tend to break up their thoughts and post them as individual sentences.
Maybe it's because that's similar to vocal communication - you want peoples'
attention as you're speaking and sending what you want to say bit by bit is
sort of like "having the floor". Or maybe it's the anxiety that the subject
will change before you're done typing. But it's terribly inefficient because
typing is slow and it results in people misunderstanding each other due to
poorly structured writing. I find discussing significant plans/changes is much
better done over email, where you get to craft your argument and make sure it
reads well before you make several other people spend their time reading it.

------
kureikain
I think a good way to use Slack is to eliminate channel idea. No one has to
constantly monitor a channel and that's expected.

Otherwise we know we can muted a channel but we cannot just do that to some
certain channel because that's where the team annouencement happens.

Email isn't good either. Email can be easily get lost and not easy to search.

To me, Slack is super useful in 2 cases:

1\. 1-1 or group chat between members on same topic 2\. Archive log: I pipe
all the information such as AWS activity(login, spin up server, AWS
cloudtrait, Audit Log: ssh in out, K8S event...)

1\. is useful to discuss on specific topics on a specificed thing.

2\. is useful for on-call people to correlate with something, such as when AWS
personal dashboard has issue we will know, when a server is added to
autoscaling pool trigger Nginx reload, we may have trigger websocket reload
and create a spike...those kind of things are very useful and easier to see
compare to email to me.

------
hw
Different teams use Slack differently, so it's kind of hard to gauge whether
un-slacking works for a team.

We have a team of < 20 and Slack (and other comms tools like Hipchat which we
used prior) were extremely useful and barely counter productive. There are a
few channels that are noisier than others, but we do have a few important ones
that are low volume where discussions do take place but are often forked into
a separate discussion on another channel.

It's all about how your team uses the tool IMO and your team's organization of
Slack. The key to FOMO is to not FOMO - missing out on conversations is fine
(there are plenty you miss out on if everyone starts communicating and meeting
offline), as long as you don't miss out on the important ones (which should be
in a shared important channel).

Also, in a small company, over-communication is often more important than non-
communication

------
huebnerob
Personally, I find it more helpful to move the locus of control inwards and
teach myself how to be productive in a diversity of circumstances. In this
case, that would mean being more intentional about how I use Slack, and
managing others’ expectations of their Slack messages to me. If you have a
coworker who expects broad latitude to demand your undivided attention at a
moment’s notice at any time, then that’s a problem that isn’t necessarily
exclusive to Slack. More realistically, it’s fine if you batch Slack
communications in your down moments like you would for any other
communications (email).

------
baxtr
I’d love to see some hard evidence on the effectiveness of slack. I’m at least
skeptical. I feel like it’s just another channel to watch. Is there any
company that got rid of email and is on slack only?

------
anontechworker
I can understand the frustration with Slack but the comment about large
companies using it doesn’t have much ground. I’m at a 3000+ employee company
and slack works great for us. I think that one thing that has helped many
people is to remember that you never have to reply immediately. Also, if
you’re a stakeholder on something, then a final decision should not be made
without your input. I’m sure that if you limit yourself to checking slack as
much as you check your email, then it won’t be such an issue.

~~~
stephengillie
> _...remember that you never have to reply immediately._

Yeah, but you have to check immediately, unless you have immense willpower.
And so the distraction is already made, the focus is lost, and the time spent
switching contexts can't be recovered.

------
rdiddly
I'm so wary of this, it has become one of my questions to interviewers - first
whether, and then how, they use Slack.

------
RyJones
This is a huge problem for the open source project I work on. New users are
overwhelmed with channels to plumb, and search is not great.

I'm open to advice on how to wean our project from chat to email (probably?)
Or some better platform that helps new users and developers onboard without so
much static

------
chiefalchemist
Fwiw, I have found that GitHub/Lab issue work great. Not only do they serve as
TODOs but those paper trails (so to speak) become part of the project's DNA
and "documentation".

Someone new coming on board has a fairly organized point of entry, warts,
bumps and all.

------
goatherders
With the fire of 1000 suns I despise Slack. Aside from the interruptions it
creates (which is not exclusive to Slack admittedly) the PC version of the app
is a resource hog. So is the android mobile version.

------
DubiousPusher
So basically, the moral of the story is to talk with your team about what kind
of communication scenarios are important to them. And find out if your current
tools are making those scenarios better or worse.

------
0x8BADF00D
Slack is still good for automated purposes, i.e. piping alerts and messages
from a service. I don’t think I’ve ever found it useful for communicating with
other people.

------
lima
Our solution to this has been to keep Slack, but only for conversations that
_need_ to happen in real time.

Anything else goes into our Discourse-based internal forum.

------
jasode
_> I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on
a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...]
My ultimate goal is to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work on
features, customer support or operational issues._

A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had
"ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications when the active
window with focus is an IDE like MS Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, emacs,
etc. Would that help you?

Basically, it would work similar to Slack's "Do Not Disturb" feature[1]. DND
could be expanded beyond "hours" to include a list of apps that shouldn't be
interrupted.

Once a programmer switches away from the code IDE to the email program, that's
the point the Slack chat notifications would appear. The idea is that
programmers already sort of interrupt themselves[2] but since that timing is
controlled by the programmer, a Slack notification is less stressful.
Thoughts?

 _> Since work never happens in a vacuum, I would be happy to have only a
single realtime notification tool (OpsGenie/PagerDuty) that sends
notifications to poeple currently on-call, and only about problems that
require realtime attention._

I don't use chat apps at work these days but when I did, I put AOL AIM, Yahoo
Messenger, etc inside of a virtual machine that was minimized on screen. That
way, everybody saw that I was "online" but their notifications were blocked
behind the vm instead of making it to my desktop's taskbar. The vm acted like
a firewall. I could then look at chat messages on my own schedule at my
leisure -- typically once or twice and hour. For workplaces that expect you to
reply to chat messages in 5 seconds, this hack won't work.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+di...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+disturb)

[2] [https://xkcd.com/303/](https://xkcd.com/303/)

~~~
ishan_chhabra
I really like the idea around "ambient awareness". I'll look into it.

Currently, I've built a slack bot for personal use that integrates with my
calendar where I can create stretches of times as "Focus" events and during
that time, the bot helps me establish an async communication model.

The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody
tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can
then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me
urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my
focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and
I can answer them one by one.

Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal
communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email
for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the
times when you need it.

You can try out the slack bot at
[https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv](https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv)

In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend
to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not
very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in
using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.

------
k__
I work remote for many years now and I never liked synchronous communication
in general.

What are your alternative approaches?

------
karmelapple
Hello! One thing I'm curious about, beberlei: is your company colocated,
remote, or a mix of the two?

~~~
beberlei
a mix, "nearmote" :-) We all live in the same city, but everyone works remote
a few hours or days per week. Also our workdays don't always match (early
risers vs night owls).

------
User23
Slack is proprietary IRC and IRC is one of the original Internet time wasters.

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marcus_holmes
We use email. Amazing how well it works for this. Who'd have thought?

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IshKebab
Sounds like he could have saved a whole lot of hassle just by removing some
slack bots and using threads.

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narinek
I suspect all these people who get anxious using Slack have never used IRC or
similar stuff; their only experience with IM might be whatsapp, twitter DMs,
etc

------
jgelsey
I don't understand why folks want _less_ information by eliminating Slack.
I've adopted Slack and 2 companies so far and find it a tremendous performance
optimizer. It's a tool for passively receiving info by choice about many
things, and for efficient conversations - especially with folks not sitting
next to me - about specific things that are important to me.

FWIW my impressions is hatred of Slack is more a hatred of "I can't control by
impulse to read everything so it's a tremendous time waster." Slack's not the
problem, it's the person's self-control that's the problem in these
situations.

~~~
beberlei
Author here. You might be right, we could be using Slack wrong. But have you
read the book "Hooked"? The author writes about Slack here:
[https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html](https://www.nirandfar.com/2014/11/slack.html)
\- Slack is built to addict people to use it. I don't want to fight against
that, I want to have tools that support my workflow.

