
Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens - zzaner
https://blog.nuclino.com/slack-is-not-where-deep-work-happens
======
protonimitate
I'll play devils advocate.

I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my
productivity.

How? \- Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the
past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to
search and find answers from other peoples conversations. \- Integration for
production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of
manually digging through several different web UIs or using a bunch of
different CLIs, I can just take a look at the corresponding channel. \-
Notifications _can be_ non-distracting. Being the correct channels, snoozing
alerts, or just exiting slack when you need the deep focus headspace, is easy.

I specifically don't want to be called/texted/interrupted in person unless
it's something severely important. 90% of the time its not. I would much
rather ignore a slack notification than answer a meaningless phonecall, or
politely tell someone to bug off in person.

I will say, the "always on" culture is hard to face when Slack/group messaging
is a companies main point of communication. Luckily, I've only ever been in
places where its been understood that you are only expected to be responsive
during your work day.

But, I think the negative effects of the cost of distraction by slack are
overblown. There are endless ways to be distracted these days, and Slack is
not the worst thing out there. You can always just exit the program.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I agree Slack can be used effectively, but I don’t think its design encourages
it. It encourages massive distraction — more active user time — by its default
client and organization level settings.

Nor do I think this is as simple as “you can simply exit the program.” If the
company or team has certain expectations on communication that won’t work if
you do it without consulting with your team. A lot of people are not in this
sort of position where they can take an action like that and not be
ostracized.

Imagine ignoring calls or emails from your boss for a day or two when it’s
clear that boss expects responses in a specific time? Exiting Slack can have
the same effect at a lot of companies.

I simply think more companies need to take the time to discuss how tools will
be used and for what purposes so everyone is on the same page. We have always
published an etiquette guide that is open for debate/change. But most places
I’ve worked use Slack and most places simply don’t discuss how it’s used so
everyone has different expectations. And being the one person trying to fix
this problem in a team can make you feel crazy.

~~~
morpheuskafka
If your company wants you to sit on Slack all day and not do "deep work" the
that's on then, and if it's a waste of your time then it will be their wasted
money. So the companies are just as invested in this as employees are.

~~~
PeterStuer
It not an even trade. 'The company' is merely wasting (often someone else's)
money. You on the other hand are wasting your own life-time.

------
rjdagost
For myself, Slack is such a time waster that I'm at the point where I only
check on it periodically. I tell coworkers that if there's an emergency that
needs to be tended to right away, just text, call, or talk to me in person. If
there's something that can wait, email is better. After 2+ years of using
Slack on several different teams, I have yet to see any enhanced group
communications. I do however see massive amounts of distractions and failed
concentration. I'm sure "I'm doing it wrong", but this has been my experience
with Slack.

~~~
fs2
My experience exactly. The most common observation with Slack is how people
praise it as the next big thing in productivity. But this is always during the
honeymoon phase, after a few months of working with Slack it usually quickly
wears off.

~~~
skohan
I find it has utility in the fact that it's a searchable record of technical
conversations I have had with my colleagues where I can go to recover details
I might not remember from a month ago. Then again email also does this just
fine, and doesn't cost as much.

~~~
grogenaut
Search is one of slacks worst features and I resort to scrolling which is also
majorly painful. I can count on one hand the number of times I've found what I
needed via slack search in 4 years with it. I've had it be unable to find the
exact text of a message on screen in a channel I'm searching in a day later
(tested).

~~~
alehul
Search is one of my favorite parts of Slack.

It assumes that I want to search within a certain channel or messages with a
certain person when that's where I'm clicking the search bar from, but I can
quickly erase that if desired. Files, messages, and people, are all
searchable. It's pretty powerful and extremely user-friendly (most non-techies
would have trouble with the syntax for specifying who a message should be from
while searching).

Meanwhile, with Gmail, I discovered yesterday that when I'm part of a mailing
list attached to an email address (let's say product@startup.com), and I
search an email address that was cc'd on the product@startup.com email,
nothing comes up. Resulted in a lot of wasted time.

------
w8rbt
Reminds me of this Knuth quote, _" Email is a wonderful thing for people whose
role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on
the bottom of things."_

Source: [https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html](https://www-
cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)

~~~
shubhamjain
To me, this can be taken as an argument against the post's premise. Could
there be any e-communication tool more asynchronous than email? (Except for
notifications, which you can turn off). I am not blaming Knuth, he must really
dislike distraction of any sort.

However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period, I can't say that Slack has
worsened the situation. When there wasn't Slack, I had people coming to my
desk to ask the question (vastly more distracting). We had meetings for tiny
questions and they stretched far too long. The culture of company that is far
more responsible than any single tool.

~~~
Jedd
> However, having lived pre- and post-Slack period ...

Perhaps I am (really) old, but pre slack is a blink of an eye ago.

Also we are, sadly, not yet post-Slack.

> ... I can't say that Slack has worsened the situation. When there wasn't
> Slack, I had people coming to my desk to ask the question (vastly more
> distracting). We had meetings for tiny questions and they stretched far too
> long. The culture of company that is far more responsible than any single
> tool.

You're describing a work environment that bewildering appears to exclude
email, or the option to explain to people how and when to use email.

~~~
IggleSniggle
I have been at several places that treat email as a formal record / promise /
contract. It’s “in writing.” I have never encountered people who use chat that
way, even though people will sometimes search the record to refresh their
memory.

------
StavrosK
For a bit of context for the following, I've been working remote for years,
five years in my previous company and one in the current one.

The previous company did not use Slack. We used XMPP for one-on-one IMing (we
did have chat rooms but nobody used them), physical desk phones for meetings
or high-bandwidth chats, and email for everything else. The current company
uses Slack and Zoom for meetings.

There's a big difference between the two companies in socialization and how
they feel, and I put it down to Slack. The old company mainly had one-on-one
chats with anything involving more people being done through well-thought-out
emails, whereas this one is pretty much exclusively chat rooms.

This has the effect that you talk about work and _only_ work, as you don't
have that dead time after you're finished talking about the thing you need to
say "what's new with you?". Instead of privately talking to your coworker and
being able to be sincere, you're yelling your conversation all around the room
so the interaction is pretty much going to be confined to work stuff.

If you're starting now, I would wholeheartedly recommend getting your
communications mostly one-on-one, and using something like Zulip for company
communications, which has the feel of email but with a better UI. I also
cannot recommend getting physical phones enough, they worked so much better
than mobile phones or Zoom that they crossed the barrier of inconvenience,
which meant we talked to each other much more often.

It's not a huge hassle to get a Zoom going, but it is _some_ hassle, and
headphones/etc are enough to dissuade us from just picking up the phone and
calling each other. Desk phones (connected to our PBX) were so seamless that
you pressed a button and were connected to your coworker instantly, with
amazing sound quality, a microphone that picked your voice up perfectly from
anywhere in the room and a physical mute button.

I should write an article about this, actually.

~~~
frgotmylogin
I've found that a good way to lower the hassle on starting a zoom is to create
a permanently open meeting with your phone number as the meeting ID. Then it
is as simple as pasting/typing a link into an IM conversation and clicking it,
and if you aren't at your own machine, it's easy to just type it. My only
complaint with zoom is the lack of a prompt before launching video. I, and
most of my coworkers, have uninstalled and taped over our webcams because of
it.

~~~
m_t
> I've found that a good way to lower the hassle on starting a zoom is to
> create a permanently open meeting with your phone number as the meeting ID

But in zoom you do have a personal meeting ID, isn't what your describing just
replacing that?

> My only complaint with zoom is the lack of a prompt before launching video.

As another commenter said, you can disable auto joining video and audio in the
settings.

I do think it should be turned off by default though.

~~~
frgotmylogin
You do get a personal meeting ID, but most people already have their phone
number memorized. Being able to just instantly start a meeting from anywhere
comes in handy.

Agreed on the default video thing. I'm in no rush to reactivate my camera
though, and "Surprise! You are on camera!" isn't something I give software a
do-over on.

~~~
m_t
Yeah I completely agree.

------
commandlinefan
Deep work? We live in a world of open offices, daily standups, max-four-hour
JIRA tickets and pair/mob programming. The people in charge don't believe that
"deep work" even means anything.

~~~
mateo411
This is true, but most if not all of these tasks don't require Deep Work. Cal
Newport is an academic. It takes a lot of thought and a distraction free
environment to write papers about CS Theory.

Most people in these environments usually know how to write software. Most of
the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep Work. The
design of these systems requires more thought, but the implementation should
be fairly straightforward once you have a plan.

~~~
commandlinefan
> Most of the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep
> Work

There's a self-fulfilling prophecy for you. We assume a priori that developing
software doesn't require much thought, so we'll skimp on environmental factors
that contribute to actual thought and see what programming we can get out of
it. And lo and behold, if you ignore the usability problems, security
problems, out-of-control memory problems and the necessity of an army of
testers to make up for the fact that nobody actually understands the code, the
resulting software kind-of sort-of meets the requirements so we were right,
software CAN be reliably produced with zero concentration in an all-
interruptions, all-the-time environment!

------
rohtul
“Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and
no agenda.”

That. So true.

~~~
vishnu_ks
Try Zulip. All meetings have an agenda!

[https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh](https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh)

Long Version: In Zulip, each and every conversation in a channel has a topic.
So for catching up one don't have to go through all messages in a channel.
Instead just go through the topic names and open the topics only you are
interested in catching up. Since each conversation can have a topic you can
reply back to conversations even after days as well as can have multiple
productive conversations in one channel at same time!

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

~~~
thecatspaw
Or continue using slack, but correctly.

We dont have offtopic in ours. We do have a #random chat, but its very
infrequently used. Instead of zulips revolutionary tags, just use the slack
threads.

Zulip wont save you if you're drowning in Slack messages.

~~~
vishnu_ks
Zulip does save you from drowning in messages! Instead of going through all
the messages, one just have to go through Topics and consume messages only
from topics they are interested in. This is so much efficient compared to a
chat system without topics :)

~~~
thecatspaw
Slack also has channels.

~~~
vishnu_ks
Topics are not the same as channels. In Zulip each conversation in a channel
would have a topic. A channel would be a collection of topics. You can ignore
the topics you are not interested in and focus on topics that are relevant. So
for catching up all you need to do is go through the topics in a channel
instead of going through all the messages.

[https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh](https://imgur.com/UMBuOuh)

~~~
thecatspaw
Just the same as I can ignore threads in Slack which I have no interest in.

Its not the tool which break communication, its people not following rules. If
people follow the "Use threads at all times" rule, slack is totally working
fine. If people dont use it as their social media platform or keep their
random thoughts to #random, there's no problem. It feels a bit tone-deaf to
promote your tool in a thread about unproductivity caused by chat tools.

~~~
vishnu_ks
> It feels a bit tone-deaf to promote your tool in a thread about
> unproductivity caused by chat tools.

The entire article was written to promote their tool Nuclino.

>> All of our team's work (including the writing of this article) happens in
Nuclino, and even though it's a real-time collaboration tool, most of it
happens asynchronously. Without the expectations of an immediate response, our
team is free to focus on our work, reconnecting later to respond. __

I don 't see any reason why one can't suggest an alternative product that
solves the issues of synchronous chat apps just like the one mentioned in the
Article. Zulip is an asynchronous tool just like Nuclino.

> Its not the tool which break communication, its people not following rules.
> If people follow the "Use threads at all times" rule, slack is totally
> working fine.

Eaxctly! People don't follow rules. Thats why Slack threads are hardly useful.
On the other hand in Zulip people always create a new topic for a new
conversation since that's how the tool is designed!

------
nottorp
I don't understand. Why do you allow Slack to interrupt you? Turn off all
notifications except the unread messages count badge and check it when it
overflows.

Easy as ABC.

I run like 6 different messaging platforms, but none is allowed to interrupt
me. If you can't restrain yourself from checking messages constantly, you have
a problem not the medium.

~~~
alxlaz
> Turn off all notifications except the unread messages count badge and check
> it when it overflows.

...then keep a straight face while your super Agile manager berates you in
front of the entire team because you're hard to communicate with, we have
Slack for a reason.

Not everyone has the choice to _not_ allow Slack to interrupt you. Some
organizations mandate this sort of communication, disruptive though it may be.

Edit: just to clarify, I'm _not_ in this situation :-D. But I've seen it
happening.

~~~
cc81
If your nature of work is such that you need to be available then I get that
your manager would berate you. It might not be what someone likes to do but
for some it is better to be available to the team than to isolate themselves
and work.

------
Hoasi
> Slack Is Not Where 'Deep Work' Happens

Sure, but that's not the point, it is not even where "work" happens. Slack can
be useful as a communication tool. There is a time for work and a time for
communication. Just as you don't answer the phone when you want to do serious
work. Likewise, meetings are a waste of time, except when meeting face to face
is useful. Communication is super important. After all, without communication,
there is no work. Tools designed to enhance communication impede it when used
as surrogate management. If Slack must be open at all times, it turns into a
distraction.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I keep slack open for 20 minutes a day max, mostly in breaks between real
work. I don't feel like I miss much.

------
mindcrime
I'm not a fan of Slack in particular just because it's a closed-source,
proprietary, walled-garden. But that aside, while it is true that "Chat / IM
apps are not where 'deep work' happens", that doesn't mean that chat / IM
isn't valuable. You just have to recognize it for what it is, and figure out
how to tap into the value that it represents.

If that means turning it all off at certain times to support "deep work" then
so be it. The question, in my mind, is how to find the optimal balance between
synchronous, interrupt-driven communication and asynchronous communication.
I'm not sure anybody has figured out the perfect answer for that yet.

~~~
beat
The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal
with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all
times?

~~~
mindcrime
_The problem is, people take offense at others turning it off. How do you deal
with the social pressure to be instantly available and interruptable at all
times?_

Hand them a copy of _Deep Work_?

Also, don't just turn it off... announce to the group "Hey guys, I'm going
offline to do deep work for the next 3 hours. Only interrupt me if the
building is on fire, OK?" or something like that. Set a status or "away
message" that says "offline for focused deep work right now. Interrupt only
for absolute emergencies." or something similar.

~~~
beat
Sure, technically it can be done. Socially, though... we have a hard time
saying no to people. That's a lot to overcome. We have tools for interruption
and social inhibitions against not using them.

~~~
mindcrime
Agreed. That's why I find it easier if you announce ahead of time, "hey guys,
I'm going offline for a while to focus on $SOME_SPECIFIC_THING". At least with
the places I've worked, and the cultures I've worked in, I've found that
people (usually) respect that.

------
beat
It's not just Slack. It's our phones! Notifications are distraction engines.

At the beginning of March, I went cold turkey on most social media (I still
allow myself HN and a guitar player's forum), and completely cold turkey on
using my phone for these things - I have to use an actual computer. I put
Kindle where Facebook used to be on my phone, and always have a book on it
that can be read in small bites for those "OMG I AM BORED FOR TWO MINUTES"
moments, and I carry a Kindle Paperwhite with longer-form reading for
lunchtime and such.

My brain feels amazingly different. I'm more aware and happier. I'm getting
more work done. My stress levels are way down. My book-reading rate has at
least tripled.

This article refers a lot to Cal Newport's excellent _Deep Work_ , but I wish
it also referred to his more recent _Digital Minimalism_ , which is full of
useful advice for limiting the ways social media and instant messaging
undermine our productivity and happiness.

~~~
chungleong
The thing that I really miss about old Windows Phone is the lack of
notifications. They're almost never that time critical. Having the same info
on a live tile was so much better. The info streams were properly segregated
and I had control over their prioritization through tile layout: important
stuff at near the top, shown in a wide tile; stupid stuff near the bottom, in
a small tile.

------
robbiep
We have a remote team and have recently implemented a rule/trial of no slack
after 10am until 4pm - so everyone can organise, everyone has enough work to
do during their 6 hrs to continue if the need to ask a question then have the
afternoon to answer questions/move forward on any blockers from their ‘time
out’

Early days but seems to be improving ‘distractability’

~~~
delinka
Now to contend with "well, can't get an answer so I'm blocked until 4pm!" In
the corporate environment I'm in, this is a fabulous excuse used by many teams
from around the world. Works for email as well.

~~~
wool_gather
If hard blockages are legitimately happening on a regular basis, being able to
ping other people is not a solution to the actual organizational problem, it's
just a band-aid.

------
PaulHoule
I worked at a startup where we were always having a hard time finding
documents and conversations. Almost every other week we would try or consider
adding another place to store documents as a solution for this problem.

I saw from the beginning that this made no sense at all, that adding a new
sharing service could only make the problem worse but I could only slow this
trend down.

A real solution would involve an intelligent aggregator that sucks it down
from those sources and imposes some structure on it together with you.

For instance the python docs have everything you need to know about Python,
Google and stack overflow are wrong at least half the time. So I build trails
over the documents that get me to reference materials i need in 1 or 2 clicks.

Control of document sharing is also a big thing in Biz.

The star salesperson was trained as a lawyer. Ask him how to share a document
and he will tell you to do it the same way my accountant does it. He doesn't
mind it when I show him something in Github because he knows familiarity with
Github gets him far in credibility with everybody.

Elsewhere in the business people use Google Docs and also collaborate with the
hugest businesses on Earth. People at those businesses might not believe
Google Docs is secure and it is not good for the relationship when somebody
shares a Google Doc in Google.

~~~
atoav
I always had the feeling there are two ways to solve this: either you go full
centralized and have ONE hub were everything important is stored and archived,
or you store it right with the work (e.g. github issues, per project wiki, or
in a folder directly in the project).

What doesn't work is a in-between-solution where you have >5 places each with
its own outdated fragments of nothingness. This means whenever you decide on
something you just will have to bite the bullet and use a meaningful amount of
time to get everything into the new system. When the new system works, it
people are more likely to honor it than contributing into something they feel
is broken and somehow meaningless.

------
king_magic
Slack/Teams/etc. are the bane of my work existence. I will only open them when
I absolutely need to. The distraction is too high and the utility is too low
for it to be worth using.

------
jackpeterfletch
When I read these kind of pieces I wonder if people know that just because
your company has Slack, that doesn't mean they expect you to read everything
in it.

Company wide/support channels, your basically at liberty to completely ignore
these. Some people crack the odd joke in here, camaraderie in a team is nice,
but don't feel its compulsory. I mute them, though they're are great places to
be able to search!

The channel for your immediate team/specific projects, your not obliged to
monitor this but it'd probably be helpful for the team if you checked in twice
a day or so, you might be able to guide or unblock a teammate with knowledge
they don't know you have.

And direct messages. Again, its up to your to triage these, if its unimportant
just mark unread and come back later.

The important point of slack is that communication is open, which brings
network effects, I cant count the number of times I've stumbled on information
that's been directly helpful to me. However, just like any other open
information portal, most of it isn't directed at you, so don't worry about it.

~~~
matchbok
But, the whole "checking in on a channel" thing is exactly the problem. It
creates a nonsense or a "missing out" feeling for the team. It is too
synchronous.

~~~
jackpeterfletch
So, I think the crux here, is that the below, in my opinion, is a purely
perceived pressure. You shoulden't feel pressured to read everything in Slack.

> Reduced pressure to read everything. Let’s face it, it’s not practical or
> necessary to keep up with every conversation. The aggregated timeline in
> Level lets you subscribe to channels and sip from the firehose of
> conversations without pressuring you to “catch up” on all unreads.

~~~
wool_gather
The fear of missing something is real. I have seen decisions taken in Slack by
two or three of the four or five people who should have been involved. I'm not
saying this is _caused by_ Slack -- the problem is absolutely with the people
who thought it was okay to act on such a decision. But I do think it's
_facilitated_ ; the people involved seem to subconsciously think that because
they're discussing in a public channel where the other people are "present"
\-- even though they're not _active_ \-- that everyone's informed. Whereas if
they'd just had a hallway face-to-face, someone would have said, "Hey, we
really need to check with Laura and Ed about this too".

~~~
gamma3
They should cc you so you get a notification. Or talk to you on person.

They shouldn't assume everyone will read every message. If it's important,
they should make sure you definitely saw it.

If you ever feel like you missed and important decision, go and politely tell
them to always get you involved.

------
pgm8705
I'm wondering if team size is what makes slack such a pain for many posters.
Slack is great for my 8 person remote company. I keep notifications off for
channels that aren't directly related to my development responsibilities, but
I value having access to them for review at the end of the day so I'm aware of
what is happening elsewhere. If I need a long stretch of uninterrupted
development time, I turn on Do Not Disturb and everyone knows not to override
this unless there is an emergency.

------
sailfast
"Deep Work" as outlined by Cal Newport was not collaborative at all. It was an
individual deep dive on a specific topic, with deep thinking and a lot of
time.

Of course Slack is not where Deep Work happens, more than the telephone is
where Deep Work happens.

Now, is [Insert persistent group chat software] where meaningful work can
happen as a team? Absolutely. Lots of things have gotten resolved, rubber
ducked, fixed, etc in those channels especially for my remote teams.

But nobody expects to get "Deep Work" done there.

------
te_chris
When I joined the startup I work at currently I had one key criteria: no
Slack. We first tried Zulip, but the interface is a mess and everyone hated
it. We've since switched to Twist and it is brilliant. The threaded model is
genuinely useful for ongoing discussions, and then group chat for small
messages. But the key effect is this: by being simple and utilitarian, people
only use it for utility. No endless gif streams, no all day shit chat. It's
great.

Messaging is genuinely useful for a productive org, Slack doesn't event come
close to providing this. As far as a better interface for IRC goes, it's good
for that, the various industry groups I'm in are good, but for work? It's a
tire fire.

------
netwanderer3
Slack only works for companies where the nature of their employees' work
actually requires team communication that will benefit the organizations.

Like everything in life, it's always a trade off. You may gain scores for team
work but will sacrifice individual creativity. Deep creative tasks always
require a full strength of focus and that state is only attainable once we
allow our mind some time to completely "dial in". You simply cannot switch
from 0 to 100 and be in the zone within the span of just a few minutes.

When you are using Slack or any social media communication platforms, your
brain must allocate cognitive resource to manage your ego because you do care
about what other people think of your opinions. Since the pool of our
cognitive resource is limited, we will have less remaining that can be
dedicated to other real creative tasks.

On top of that, you now have a distraction source where you constantly have to
switch attention to. This may condition your brain over time and cause it to
lose the ability to "dial in".

Some companies were eager to force employees into using these tools while it
didn't really provide any real tangible benefits, and may in fact even be
destructive. Within a company only some departments should use it but some
definitely shouldn't. It's the same reason why open office concept may work
for certain organizations but not for all.

~~~
gregmac
I think the Slack default of "Notify me on every new message" is the absolute
worst thing. Change it to "Notify me on direct messages and mentions only".
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is a reasonable default, but I've seen it
with other chat applications too -- Hipchat was the same, IIRC.

I don't monitor Slack (though everything I say here applies to any 'chat'
app). It _can_ interrupt me, but only when people @-mention me, and then at
least there's a reason. Sometimes I even ignore those for a while until I'm
able to shift focus, but that takes some discipline. If you don't have the
discipline, close Slack (or set to DND) for a few hours while you work on
something.

What's the alternative to Slack -- Email? That's a million times worse, in
every way. It's a necessary email when talking externally, but would ban it in
a heartbeat for internal comms, if I had my way. In my view, every every email
breaks down into three categories that are better served by another means of
communication:

* A task that needs to be completed == A ticket

* Information to be shared to a group of people == Internal CMS posting (eg, wiki)

* A discussion about something (which will usually lead to one of the above) == A conversation in Slack (asynchronous, equivalent to email) or a meeting (synchronous, if decision needs to be made quickly, and/or everyone is discussing in real-time anyway)

The only thing e-mail is actually useful for is notifications from systems you
don't monitor/use frequently and that can't notify via Slack, and
communicating with people externally.

Likely the people interrupted by Slack messages (assuming they don't use the
brain-dead default of 'notify on all messages') are also currently interrupted
by every e-mail or phone call that comes in, so I'm not really sure you can
blame a lack of focus on Slack.

------
bitwize
It is a truth universally acknowledged among managerial types, that given
enough collaboration, all work becomes shallow. To that end, the business will
increase the number of collaborative tools and the expectation of their use,
because deep work presents a problem. It is a risk incurred by the business.
Creative effort by an individual is not auditable, there's no paper trail. No
actionable data -- data that would allow the business to verify each step of
the process and estimate time and cost to completion -- is produced other than
the creative output itself. The only person qualified to assess whether deep
creative work by an individual is on track, on time, and under budget is the
individual themself and they cannot be trusted! "Beware the guy in a room."

So the deep parts of the work are now the responsibility of the team, and in
order to do that, the team needs to stay in constant communication. Yes, it's
slower and less efficient, but the business values reliability and
accountability at the expense of some efficiency.

This is why you don't get an office or even a desk -- you get about one linear
meter of bench on which to set up your MacBook. This is why availability on
Slack is paramount. This is why you're responsible for attending standup,
planning, retro, grooming, Three Amigos, and whatever parking-lot meetings
your PM has called throughout the week in addition to all the work you've
committed to this sprint. This is why "sprints" in the first place.

If you work for corporate, odds are you've signed up to join a hivemind, with
all that entails.

~~~
gamma3
I've worked at a company that did the sprints, planning, retro, Three Amigos
etc.

So glad we don't do any of that at my new company! And it turns out we ship
stuff much faster.

------
aloukissas
Coincidentally, I was just listening a podcast episode with the creator of
Level ([https://level.app/](https://level.app/)), which was built to fix
exactly all these issues mentioned in the article. I agree 100% with this -
the culture of ASAP and the FOMO that's created if you're not always on Slack,
prevents one from doing deep, meaningful work. I'm really looking forward to
trying out Level.

~~~
ptasker
We're currently using Level now and it's definitely different from Slack. I
think the biggest issue we have with it at this point is that it's still in
active development.

It's also missing a lot of things that you take for granted with Slack. Things
like auto-link expansion and third-party integrations of any kind.

------
backpackway
Guess I get downvoted to hell but I won't care and share my thoughts:

Slack is for most employees a way to socialize, to get connected, to be not
alone because employees are actual lonesome creatures looking for community,
looking for something to belong to. Heck, companies are for employees the
same. They want to to find friends, to get laid, to network because they can't
outside of their free-lunch-corp. If they had to work in the basement in a
shitty 3-people-firm, alone, they would have run away the first day.

I haven't been employed for a long, long time, so my view on employees is
quite negative and opinionated: employees except the sales ones are in terms
of social interactions, networking, finding friends compared to non-employees
way underdeveloped (to use a polite term). Don't confuse hanging around with
peers in a company being social. Most wouldn't be able to find close peers
outside of their company and comfort zone.

Hence, they need Slack so urgently, so they can chat, plan boring get-
togethers and like each others messages with crappy emojis.

~~~
atoav
Interesting take on it. For me Slack always felt like something for people
who, well, are kinda bored.. just like it was made to slack around – you get
the idea.

I always found emails more productive for exactly that reason – you don't get
so many pointless jokes and people have to set priorities whom to write what
thing.

And if you really wanna have human interaction, just go there, make a 5 minute
coffee break with them, have a little chat and be on your way. Or well, call,
write them on the messenger of your choice, something like that.

------
geekamongus
I have to minimize Slack throughout the day in order to get work done, and I
try to only pay attention to it when I hear the alert noise when someone @'s
me, which unfortunately I mis-hear all the time.

My brain thinks it hears that alert noise beneath the music I have playing, or
if I go to the other room it thinks it hears it from afar, so I run back to my
desk to see if someone is messaging me.

I hate that I have been conditioned this way, but I don't foresee it changing
in my workplace any time soon. Some people I work with are on Slack _all_ day
chatting, and I really question if they are ever doing anything else.

~~~
jorisw
Can't you disable the sound, so that you know that when you think you hear it,
it's not meant for you?

------
rob74
"you could try the monastic approach, ditching the city for a gig as a
caretaker at an isolated hotel" \- you can read "The Shining" to see how that
may turn out...

------
swozey
Slack makes me miss Discord. Slack has taken a hard stance on how company
culture should dictate it's use and doesn't give you the options to customize
it away from their own viewpoint at all. I use Slack on a massive 40k person
server (and probably 10 other servers) and it's absolutely terrible in this
environment, as a non-admin you have no self support mechanisms (blocking DMs,
muting users, etc). I really wish FOSS projects would stop using Slack, if the
community grows to be large it's untenable and requires a ton of moderation
time. I don't really want to go back to IRC but Slack isn't a good solution
for them. There are so many options and features they could add that could be
controlled by admins but they refuse to add them.

([https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/767806840524705792?lang=en))

* You can sort channels and even put them into folders (Engineering, HR) * You can choose who to accept DMs from * You can block/mute users

There's probably a ton of other things I'm not aware of. I rarely use Discord,
but every time that I do I leave wishing companies I worked at used that
instead.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
It's weird how Discord is better at being Slack than Slack is, in addition to
everything else Discord does.

I wonder if Discord could make a business-oriented fork without the integrated
game store and so forth.

------
village-idiot
The tragedy of slack is that it was supposed to save us from email. The irony
is that email itself was never the problem, as always it was people & culture.

------
EGreg
I will go further. None of the most popular top tools are promoting the best
mode of whatever they are doing. And most of it has to do with realtime and
notifications being abused in the interest of profit by centralized
corporations that want to lock people into their platform and get them to
"engage" with it.

Slack for work - not the best for actually writing useful messages, more like
<blah><return> <blah><return> and working people see ping ping ping, go back
in and respond, and on it goes.

Twitter for news - not the best for actually having productive discussions,
more like <shout><announce><snipe><war> and most people see ping ping ping,
and go back in and like/retweet to their 5 followers.

Facebook for social - not the best for actually getting together (i.e. social
life), more like <post cat video><post wedding photo><post political
meme><post outrage> and lonely people sit at home and see ping ping ping, and
go back in and respond, and on it goes.

By now many of you know that I have spent the last 7 years working on a
solution. The problem is that in order to build anything people will want to
use, you need to spend at least half a million dollars on a realtime platform
that can do stuff. If you want to see the problems and solutions, check out
the videos on these pages:

[https://qbix.com](https://qbix.com)

[https://qbix.com/platform](https://qbix.com/platform)

[https://qbix.com/blog](https://qbix.com/blog) (latest post)

------
Funes-
The mental and logistical acrobatics being proposed by users on this comment
section only shows one thing about Slack (and any other app that is built on
the optimization of an "engagement" metric): If you have to go _that_ far to
prevent something from easily taking all your attention and time, wouldn't you
argue that it is, in fact, its design which is flawed, and not its users?

------
exachtly
This article seems to be unaware that there are many jobs which exist solely
for doing shallow work. I'd say for most "knowledge work" or "white collar"
jobs shallow work is the point. A job that demands deep work consistently is
pretty rare (see: Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber). In that respect, Slack is a
perfect fit for most employees.

------
atoav
I like email more than Slack for asynchrounous communication, Signal more than
Slack for one-on-one or small group and IRC better than Slack for bigger
groups or topic based conversations.

I tried to like it. I am a young person for whom IRC and Email seem very
oldfashioned. But hey, it works and doesn't get me distracted.

------
dredmorbius
The only thing that's made large discussion platforms useful to me is ruthless
blocking of noise. As one of my more popular G+ posts[1] said; "This One Trick
Will Revolutionize Your Use of Social Media: Block fuckwits."[2]

The problem with entepriise tools, both technical capabilities and
organisational contexts, is that this is often neither supported nor
acceptable.

Everyone does not have to have full interrupt access to everyone else.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.goog...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190330111120/https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/drLZV8sm7Tq)

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Thank you, Internet Archive.

2\. Based on my Google Data Takeout, about 3,000 blocked profiles. I'll miss
those.

------
osmyn
This is a big reason behind why I created
[https://ourtimetothink.com](https://ourtimetothink.com) \- a tool for teams
on Slack to manage their DND status for scheduled blocks of time each day so
they can get some deep work done

------
skc
The only time I ever see positive views on Slack here is when Microsoft Teams
is brought up :D

~~~
Kiro
It's because HN is a stereotypical echo chamber where the correct opinion
right now that fits the stereotype is to hate Slack.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That added nothing to the conversation. HN may have a uniformity of opinion,
because a large fraction of effective people in Software don't like something.
That would be worth talking about. Ad Hominem attacks are pointless.

~~~
Frost1x
While his/her comment may have been narrowly directed and could even be
bordering trolling/flame-baiting, it made me think about how the structure of
discussion groups in general could encourage echo chambers. His/her comment is
a case-in-point as it's being downvoted.

I tend to believe discussion groups with comment voting systems (e.g., Reddit,
Digg years ago) tend to further or more quickly close communication feedback
loops that help lead to echo chambers: "what we like, what don't we like."
People who want to actively engage will be more quickly discouraged if their
perspectives differ and are quickly shunned, even if they're potentially
valid. Those who remain will be conditioned with positive reinforcement when
they repeat the status quo ("rewarded" with up-votes from peers).

Comment voting systems tend to suppress perspectives that challenge the status
quo in general (they can also promote challenges, though anecdotally, I
observe this far less). Even without voting systems though, peer pressure in
discussions shapes the discussions in a feedback loop that, in my opinion,
leads to echo chambers of perspectives.

Obviously the tradeoff is: what's the alternative? True garbage is posted that
should be removed (spam, direct personal attacks, etc.). Moderator and editor
systems shape discussions to their bias vs. a more distributed voting approach
biases towards the status quo. Another option is to allow any perspective a
perpetual voice (false negative spam and uncivil discussion emerges) which
requires filtering/ignoring on a per participant/client basis (not good at
promoting return visitors who want quality discussions), but this does allow
exposure to new and differing perspectives.

I'm not sure what the best solution is. As you pointed out, and I agree
entirely with you, his/her comment certainly could have been presented better
and didn't need to attack HN directly. At the very least, for me, it
illustrates frustration as a symptom of a potentially systematic problem.

Sometimes, I do wonder if "trolling" and "flamebaiting" often regarded as
negative behaviors, are in reality healthy for discussion groups. They
encourage a never ending revaluation (QA/QC, CD even) of ideologies adopted by
the status quo and foster a competitive behavior of ideas using emotion for
drive and momentum. I've read some of the best in-depth and even enlightening
discussions spun out from such comments, once you get past initially
emotionally fueled personal attacks. To be fair, I've also observed some of
the most worthless volleyball of personal attacks. I suggest those
disagreements and the emotional fuel help us push away complacency and strive
for improvement instead of avoiding challenges. Without any emotion, few have
desire to bpther exploring some ideas. Emotion isn't required to have a
progressive discussion, but it seems to me to help light fires and engage more
ideas, especially if done tastefully.

------
m0zg
Slack's design encourages water-cooler back and forth ad nauseam. One of my
clients uses it, and because I now track nearly all my working time, I know
exactly how much money they waste because I'm on slack. In fact they waste
even more than I charge them, because there are usually at least 2 more people
bullshitting on slack pretty much continuously. Something that would be solved
in 5 minutes through email or chat turns into a 30-40 minute clusterfuck and
nothing gets solved.

------
peter_d_sherman
Fascinating article and discussion.

I'm not sure I completely agree with the article's premise, but what's
important here is the debate, rather than the article's premise or
conclusions.

This discussion would be broadened by the question: "With respect to the tools
that a company mandates you use (and this includes software, like Slack) -- do
those tools control you, or do you control them, and do they make you more
productive or less productive, and in what scenarios?"

Maybe that's a separate discussion however...

------
jayjaybinks
This is exactly why we switched to Twist. Slack is fun but toxic. Working in
an open office is bad enough but at least you can use noise canceling
headphones. No such remedy for Slack.

~~~
codingdave
This is a cultural problem. You can close Slack. You can check it every couple
hours and catch up. You can turn off notifications. If your management has
problems with this, that is a problem with their culture, not the tool.

We have channels where discussions will spread over multiple days because
there simply is no expectation that Slack is real-time.

~~~
amichal
Indeed. There are 80+ channels in my workplace of 20 people. Most people are
subscribed to just a few relevant to their current projects and there is zero
expectation that a non direct message will be read by subscribers until they
are next focused on the project. It serves a semi public record of what’s
going on and a place for questions, notifications of important updates. It
makes it easier for me to focus on work not harder since I can drop out for
hours or days and trust that I can come back and be well informed.

~~~
grogenaut
We have around 6k channels for our 1500 employees. I have around 60 I'm in
that I need to pay some level of attention to or that I'll get Facebook
defriend shamed for leaving. Conversations happen instantly and at odd hours
and decisions are made and then scrolled past. Each team I work with has at
least 3 channels, public, private, oncall/cr. Often an additional one per
micro service. It's a mess.

------
matchbok
Experiment for slack lovers: Start talking about something in a channel with
~20 people. Have another use try to start another conversation in the same
channel. This is a common occurrence. The other users either have to spam the
channel or wait until _your_ topic is complete, which could never be!

What happens? Garbage. Chat is not how work gets done. Or how knowledge is
transferred and, most importantly, retained.

~~~
smolder
There are a few ways of dealing with this that I've seen. On IRC, when a
direct back-and-forth starts, etiquette is to name the other party
specifically at the start of each line. Every client I've used will highlight
those lines where your name is mentioned, making it easier to pick out your
thread of conversation. The text is typically packed in pretty tight as well,
which makes this more feasible in busy channels since you're not likely to
have to scroll. Some clients also have a separate UI section for messages that
target you, making it even easier to follow.

In Slack, the chat contents are shown in a less dense way (more whitespace &
separation, big user icons,) but they found a solution that seems to work
pretty well, which is the 'thread' feature. (This is pretty recent AFAIK.)
Threads stay collapsed for people who aren't participating and pop out for
people who want to.

While they are pretty much inevitable, multiple orthogonal conversations
happening in a channel might also sometimes be a call for reorganization or
sidebar channels/group chats.

As an aside, one of my favorite experiences relating to chat is having
multiple concurrent conversations with the same person or people, on different
topics, in their respective channels. It highlights how bizarre the rapid
context-switching pattern you fall into with chat applications is.

------
gamma3
I close Slack and focus on coding. I take short breaks from coding every 1-2
hours, and check Slack.

Replying to someone 2 hours later has never been an issue.

If it's urgent, people drop by my desk.

Definitely don't have slack on my phone, and when Slack is closed, I don't get
any kind of notifications.

Being able to focus is important. In the end it matters I deliver on the
project, not that I reply to every question immediately.

------
dyeje
I like Nuclino slot but I don't think it replaces Slack very well. At the end
of the day you need a synchronous ping.

------
woliveirajr
I went on to favorite this one and saw that my last time favorite was
this:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12419649)

I think it tells me something about a persistent problem, curiosity or
struggle.

------
swagatkonchada
how about no notifications for messages unless the sender specifically says
"send notification"?

------
zitterbewegung
Slack is not a good product fit for every company . To be honest I think it
can work for organizations under 20 people because startups were targeted
first . If you want something that can scale then use discord or email/IM
etc..

------
anotheryou
How about permanent "Do not disturb"?

People can still override it if they have to and you can catch up with all the
static whenever it suits you.

------
vernie
I love it when people use that terrible "backtrack" comic.

------
guaka
Neither is Hacker News.

~~~
grogenaut
I'm not required to use HN by my job. I am required to be available on slack.

------
icedchai
Slack is fine if you turn off essentially all notifications. The same is true
of email.

Any sort of notification / alert is disruptive to deep (real) work. If it's
urgent, send me a text. Or, god forbid, a phone call.

~~~
rc_kas
I leave notifications on. But for christ sakes -- logout of the Slack app when
you want to focus. I logout for long periods and then open it back up when I
want to see what the rest of the team has going on.

------
athenot
_Disclaimer: I work for Webex Teams, another collab tool._

I think a lot of this depends a lot more on the expectations of the whole
group. This needs to be defined at an org level and well understood by
everyone. It's not so much the tool as how it's used.

There is now a continuum of interactions:

\- FYIs that are put out in a topical chat. You get to those when you have a
moment, when you go through your unread rooms to catch up. Same for topics
that you are only peripherally following. Time is not of the essence there.
Zero interruption here and no expectation for you to be always listening.

\- Topical chats where you are @-mentionned. This is where a conversation that
you're not actively following suddenly took a turn where your input is
sollicited. But since you see the topic of the room, you are in control about
whether it's worth an interruption. The group's expectation is that the person
that was mentionned will join the conversation _IF_ they are not in the middle
of something (assuming the topic is not alarmist).

\- New rooms that got created around a topic or you getting added to an
existing room. Basically it's similar to the above, where you're getting
dragged into a conversation.

\- 1:1 chats with specific requests. Again, it depends who it's from, you
triage based on origin. But the expectation is already managed at our group
level.

In all these modes, you can chose to accept the interruption or defer it. The
deeper your work, the more likely you can defer it. We can operate like this
because we have the nuclear option we can always use when it's actually
needed: PagerDuty. This brings a few benefits: the person paging a team or
another individual is aware that they are putting a burden of urgency and
there's a recorded audit log of that page. So it's not used lightly.

Once you've accepted the interruption though, you still get to control its
modality.

\- Very often, a "hey, quick question" can turn into something WAY larger than
the requester could imagine. That's when we point them to creating a Jira
ticket, effectively punting a synchronous interruption into an asynchronous
unit of work. Or you can tell the requester to schedule a meeting to work more
deeply on that. (Related topic: ALWAYS have at least one day where it is
forbidden to schedule meetings, accros the whole org.)

\- If the request is about an urgent matter, we just do an instant video
meeting within Webex Teams. That converts long drawn out chats into quick
visual meetings where the nuances are better expressed. Because in a long
chat, the mind is already interrupted, so having to wait for typing and
confirming nuance ends up taking a lot of time.

------
justaaron
"captain obvious called"

~~~
justaaron
the name gives you a clue...

~~~
justaaron
... although i have to wonder about the sanity of companies willing to pay for
viewing their own messages past 10k on a threaded messaging app, one level
above to-dos-mvp and 2 above hello world... the css is nice, i guess....

