
What happened when Buffer stopped using Slack on Fridays - prostoalex
https://www.fastcompany.com/90244091/what-happened-when-buffer-tried-turning-off-slack-on-fridays
======
sidhanthp
Honestly, I never viewed Slack as synchronous. I kept all notifications off,
and checked it whenever I had a few minute break or wanted to catch up on our
office's conversation.

Slack allowed anyone to contact me by tagging me or @here, so it was obvious
when someone wanted it to be synchronous (therefore breaking my
communication), but the grand majority of communication was asynchronous
unlike email - which does a poor job of differentiating between messages that
should (and shouldn't) break attention.

~~~
lordnacho
I work fully remote and that's what I think as well. It's a thing that let's
you wait or respond immediately, up to you. That's the major selling point.

Depends on company culture, of course. But my team is also distributed from -8
to + 10 UTC. So nobody is expecting someone who is asleep to write back to
them.

Another thing to note is the presence of other sources of communication, like
GitLab issues. If you have those you don't always have to ping a live person
in sync mode. Often you can just pick up an issue and do it with minimal
input.

~~~
xte
Hem, plain classic emails offer the very same thing: it's up to you respond
quickly or leave the message behind... IMAP IDLE is not exactly a new thing...

~~~
lordnacho
As does snail mail.

But I think by now the benefits of a chatroom UX are clearly valued by a lot
of people.

~~~
xte
Mh, perhaps lot of people who never tried good modern MUA like notmuch-emacs
or mu4e or perhaps even mutt&forks of pine&forks...

I still have to find a webui more effective than my notmuch-emacs UI (with, of
course, notmuch underneath)...

------
matchbok
Productivity would go even higher if you stopped using for the other 4 days.
Synchronous chatrooms have very little work value in my experience. You either
miss out on a ton of information from all the people chatting or you have to
watch it every minute for updates. Nonsense.

~~~
tootie
Then you haven't balanced the size of your rooms. Slack should be your first
and primary communication channel and there's a load of good reasons.

For one, you can never guarantee nor should you expect your team to be
colocated. Even if you have one office, people should be free to work from
home. Side chats get lost, people forget or don't hear. Slack is public and
searchable. No mumbling and if you mistype, you can fix it. Plus you can add
documents, links, images while you're talking.

People say getting communication on their phones is like an anchor to their
desk but I feel the exact opposite. It means I can leave my desk anytime I
want and not be out of communication. If something critical needs my
attention, I can answer while I'm home and not go back to work.

~~~
gerdesj
_Slack should be your first and primary communication channel_

Am I old fashioned in thinking that voice to ear (or nearest equivalent)
should have the role of primary communication channel?

~~~
tootie
It can't be primary. If you're going to schedule a meeting you need a fixed
agenda and the right attendees to not waste people's time. If you have an
agenda and need a decision made as a group, then definitely call a meeting.

------
wpietri
From what I've experienced, slack is to the virtual company what the open
office plan is to physical offices. Cheap, easy, and in many ways pleasant,
but having everyone present in the same space makes it very hard to focus.

For centuries tech has been about making everything easier, faster, more
connected. IMHO, next we have to thoughtfully and discerningly step back from
that where it isn't helping.

As an example, for the last 30 days I've stopped looking at news and Twitter
before noon. They put me in a fast-paced, reactive, what's-next mindset.
Leaving them until later means I'm more focused and less tense. I'm doing it
for at least another 30 days.

~~~
Alex3917
> makes it very hard to focus.

Companies don't go out of business because employees are distracted by chat
messages and noisy conversations, they go out of business because employees
are working on the wrong thing. Slack still has a lot of work to do if they
really want to succeed in their mission, but I also don't think it's entirely
fair to judge them (excessively) negatively based on it being distracting
because that's not the point.

~~~
wpietri
> entirely fair to judge them (excessively) negatively

This is tautological. Maybe try expressing this more usefully?

> Companies don't go out of business because employees are distracted by chat
> messages and noisy conversations

Why not? Unending distraction raises costs and encourages a focus on the
urgent rather than the important. That will raise prices and lower the
company's ability to do strategic rather than tactical work. That seems like a
major risk to me.

I agree that there are risks the other direction as well. A company can become
too insular or too scattered. But that doesn't mean that one can ignore the
opposite risks.

> being distracting because that's not the point

I agree that's not the point for them. But as a user, it's definitely a point
for me. And if you're looking for ways that companies go out of business,
doing what they want rather than what the user needs is a common one.

------
zwayhowder
> 4\. A CASUALTY: “CHECK OUT THIS ARTICLE I SAW”

Wait what? If only there was some application out there that could queue up
article sharing to an appropriate time.

~~~
yaseer
This made me lol, but also reflect.

I bet the people that championed this deep work experiment, ironically, do not
like social media for its distracting effects. It's the main reason I stay off
social media.

~~~
nerpderp83
You are on social media right now.

~~~
ams6110
Yes and no. HN is definitely social, but there are no friends, no feeds, and
no notifications, so it's unlike social media as most people understand the
term.

If I skip HN for a day, there's a whole front page of articles that I'll
probably never see, and never know that I missed.

------
p1necone
I don't get the slack hate. It's just a chatroom, if your team is using it in
a way that impedes productivity that's on you. Noone is forcing you to look at
it immediately every time there's new conversation happening.

~~~
InclinedPlane
> " _Noone is forcing you to look at it immediately every time there 's new
> conversation happening._"

Nobody except your employer. In shops that use slack it is often the
expectation that slack messages should be read and responded to ASAP. If
someone PMs you in slack that is taken to be the equivalent of an IM or a
phone call, with the same implications of urgency. If there is a chat for your
specific team then it's expected you are following that pretty closely (at
least as closely as your email if not more so).

Additionally, sometimes it's not possible to avoid paying too much attention
to slack. If people have a habit of dumping lots of context and decision
making into slack without putting that info elsewhere (like wiki, issues,
email, etc.) then at some point you need to go back and read all that backlog
to keep up to date on what the hell is going on, typically it's far easier to
do that as close in time as possible to the original messages, so that you're
in the loop. Relatedly, people have a habit of having substantive
conversations and effectively virtual meetings in slack which can include
decision making as well. Meaning they can make decisions without your input,
advice, or consent if you're heads-down and not paying attention, which can
mean people make the wrong decisions (they did it without additional context,
information, or advice you could have provided) or they make decisions that
put you individually at a disadvantage (because you "weren't in the room" when
things got decided).

Yes, these are absolutely undesirable and unnecessary ways of using the
platform but they are also very common and they are some of the big reasons
why people tend to dislike slack.

~~~
ramraj07
Sucks for you that you need to be responding ASAP but that's not necessarily
the norm. My organization and team clearly set expectations that we are only
expected to respond ASAP if it's regular work hours or if you're on call. All
other times people can ping you but no one's gonna hold you to it if you don't
reply all Sunday.

In our team what organically transpires is that we generally get a response
time of 3-8 hours over weekends and a few hours in weekday evenings. No one's
complaining over lost sleep.

And from what I've heard from my friends who all made informed decisions on
where to work, that seems to be the norm. I'm perfectly fine with that. Looks
more like you've decided these hardass companies are the only places worth
working at for various reasons and have concluded that these are the norms
everywhere.

~~~
adrianmsmith
"only expected to respond ASAP if it's regular work hours" \- I think
InclinedPlane meant regular work hours.

It's a problem if you have to respond ASAP during work hours, if your job
involves doing deep work during work hours.

------
ebzlo
I think the distinction between async and sync messaging is really critical
here and highlights a different form of communication that folks are
incorrectly using Slack to solve.

When I was at Facebook, this type of communication was extremely abundant and
took place on Workplace. When you are pushed information, there is some
expectation to respond (as highlighted by the author). However, Workplace's
opt-in type of communication via feed didn't have this problem. And
interestingly isn't really prevalent outside forums and groups (which I don't
think are used commonly at companies).

I think splitting out that kind of behavior was beneficial, it wasn't email
(which is a push that people ignore), but rather a subscribe where there was
no stigma to be late, and people could take their own time to catch up on
posts.

~~~
matchbok
Exactly. 99% of workplace coms don't need to be synchronous. Slack assumes
that they do. Thus you get tons of noise and chatter and the feeling that you
have to check it all the time.

Hell, even the idea of a chat room isn't productive to getting "work" done at
all IMO. If you aren't watching it every minute, you immediately lose all the
context and knowledge. It's such a waste.

~~~
sotojuan
Nah. Just turn off all notifications outside of mentions. If people want to
reach you they can mention or message you. I do this and don’t check Slack for
hours or even a whole day.

Most problems people have with Slack are people problems.

~~~
ams6110
I'm not on Slack, we have Lync or whatever Microsoft calls it now at work. I
have all notifications off, so I only notice new messages when I bring that
window to the foreground.

------
docker_up
I think a no-Hacker-News or no-reddit day would be far more productive for me.

~~~
ry_ry
I spend more time knowingly slacking off than I do reading slack.

Then again I fully subscribe to the '4 hours of full productivity per day'
theory.

~~~
Jaruzel
Is that a real theory? Seems to totally fit how I work!

------
starshadowx2
In my experience the use of a chatroom has been nothing but positive. We use
Google Chat and it's largely where I do most of my work even. I'm able to talk
to any person in the organization (which is very spread out physically)
instantly.

All of my coworkers share information and ask each other questions either
directly or in our shared rooms and all of that can be easily searched and
found by anyone else who needs it.

Maybe it's just something Chat does better than Slack (no experience with it)
but I can mute any person, room, or conversation in a room. Personally I don't
use sound notifications so maybe that's more of a bother. Since Chat is just a
tab I have open I can just look up and see the icon colour change when
something new shows up (blue for new message, red for new direct message).

All of this also really hinges on the type of work you do I guess as well.

~~~
mattmanser
_We use Google Chat and it 's largely where I do most of my work even_

Most of us here have jobs where our actual work needs to be done outside of
chat rooms.

~~~
starshadowx2
>All of this also really hinges on the type of work you do I guess as well.

------
stephengillie
The worst part of a synchronous chatroom is repeatedly asking for something
you need now - and getting drowned out by irrelevant conversations, other tech
chats, and cat gifs. Because you need the PR to finish the ticket and go home.
But 2 people who are done for the day are still discussing house siding with a
remote dev.

~~~
crooked-v
That's what separate channels are for.

~~~
stephengillie
You're suggesting to start a new channel just for the PR?

~~~
learc83
I think they're suggesting seperate channels for the non work related stuff.

Or just smaller channels in general.

~~~
stephengillie
And how do you expect to get the siding discussion into the other channel if
you can't get their attention?

~~~
learc83
It's not a one time deal. You have to set the expectation that some channels
are for work only, some channels are for off-topic discussions.

You might need someone with some authority to help with this. I take charge of
managing some of the slack channels at my company, and we're able to keep the
off-topic conversation mostly contained.

------
Benjammer
"But you don't _have_ to do X"

"But you _could_ use it like Y"

Stop with this. Why are you trying to force the square peg into the round hole
so hard? Why do people like the idea of using Slack against how it's designed?
These arguments are so tiresome.

~~~
RHSeeger
Can you explain why you think Slack is designed to be synchronous and have
people constantly checking it? I don't feel like to pushes me in that
direction at all.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Because its design primarily pushes sync and while you can do async with it,
many bosses treat is as an instant messenger.

------
ddtaylor
A bit off-topic but the nagging and distracting on that website is
insufferable. Firefox reader mode did a great job of cleaning it up and making
it readable.

~~~
jakobegger
I really wonder how a website can end up looking like this:
[https://i.imgur.com/GL2buwD.png](https://i.imgur.com/GL2buwD.png)

~~~
pragmatick
Well, the top and bottom notifications are probably due to GDPR.

But the one on the left is horrible, yes.

~~~
jakobegger
I'm not sure how being related to GDPR somehow makes them okay? It's still a
crappy experience.

------
paulie_a
Slack is good for group messaging for a real time chat about an issue that
will get resolved hopefully in the next few hours, coordinating lunch orders,
posting random YouTube videos, news articles and memes.

There are focused channels on dealing with specific projects that can be
productive. But those are lesser utilized.

The daily stand-up channel, only a couple people actually read them. For
actual stand-ups, every one is checked out.

Slack is nice for a few things because email is useless with thousands of
emails that are irrelevant. On the plus side I'm glad I don't have a work
voicemail anymore.

At a previous company the owner would forward 30 minute recordings of a
conversation, for 3 years I just deleted every voicemail. It actually never
caused a problem. Every day I'd have 8-10 voicemails waiting, every day I just
hit 7, 8-10 times.

People over communicate but say nothing important and it just adds noise.

------
throwaway-18
I'm inbox zero type of personality and my workplace is incredibly email heavy.
Reply-All with far more people than need be present is commonplace and it
almost feels taboo to remove someone. What you end up with in a situation like
that is inbox overload, synchronous conversations in email and lots of anxiety
because now I have 2,000 emails in my "inbox" and just the thought of
categorizing them now exhausts me.

For that type of culture, I much prefer slack. The synchronous conversation
can happen, you can choose to pay attention or not and, generally, someone
will @ you if they really need your input. The one thing I wish slack had was
a way to mark comments as "decision points", much like what I heard stride was
doing. Hopefully that'll get merged into slack after the buyout.

~~~
swozey
I've taken up almost refusing to use email (I'm in engineering if it matters).
I'll write RFOs and that sort of "report" portion via email, write HR, etc, or
communicate outside of the company with it but I'll go days now without even
opening my inbox.

I am absolutely up-front about it as well and mention it to my managers and
other engs and a lot of them say the same thing.

Either the companies I've worked for over the last 10 years have gone more and
more that route or the fact that I don't check email is causing people to not
email me.

It's fabulous.

------
subpixel
"...the vast majority of summer Fridays were spent in deep work, strategic
thinking, or learning a new skill. When the team was surveyed each Monday, no
one ever reported taking the Friday fully off."

This made me chuckle. What do you expect employees to say in that situation?

------
luckydata
Slack is a cancer, I said it publicly in multiple avenues and I still believe
it's fundamentally true. I hate it and I hope it went away. At this point it's
the digital equivalent of open spaces.

------
sokoloff
Most used Slack channels at our company:

#freefood<location>

------
gnulinux
In my current work we use Zulip and I'm very happy. I'm one of those people
who is fine with most stuff and never complain so you wouldn't read a
complaint of zulip from me but I honestly really like it. We get real time
errors and alarms in dev systems and prob via zulip and its asynchronous model
works super good.

------
dleslie
BaseCamp + Slack has been a general win for us.

We use BaseCamp for anything that should have any temporal meaning beyond the
present, and Slack for water-cooler conversation, coordinating tests,
coordinating releases, hot-topic issues, and similar. Basically, anything that
is best served with a post-mortem or no record at all goes in Slack.

Slack can be totally ignored and one can remain a positively contributing
member of the team; but it exists because we're social mammals and we _don't
have an office_. Slack _shouldn't_ be ignored because it is a place of
coordination and rapid response, but it _can_ be if one wants to focus on a
particular task.

That said, Slack's VoIP for meetings sucks when you have more than a half-
dozen people.

~~~
rprime
I've been looking to ditch Slack in favor of Basecamp, isn't Campfire enough
to replace Slack?

~~~
dleslie
We tried campfire and found that mapping chat to projects didn't make sense
when what we really wanted was an office banter space. It was even harder to
track meaningful conversations!

Also, not enough fun integrations for our team. We have all sorts of custom
bots, emoji, and such. ;)

------
xte
Any "big" try to offer "emails alternative" simply because emails are free,
interoperable and decentralized, something IT's bigs do really dislike. They
want control and they want people live on their platform not on their own
world.

That's why we do not have any modern MUA for non techies, that's why there is
a big push to web-crap stuff. That's why there is a big push toward
centralization instead of cooperation and "power/responsibility division".

People today do not even realize that we are in process to became new
illiterate, even loosing writing (on keyboard eh!) ability in favor of
audio/video contents, the new "oral system".

------
zby
15 years ago I thought that we are soon going to use our communication tools
in an informed manner - what needs synchronicity will be done on IMs, what is
more conversational, but not synchronous, will stay email, things that are
more contextual will move to wikis, we'll have general pub-sub infrastructure
where the sender and the receiver would have means to negotiate what gets
through.

But now I learned that channel stickiness is much bigger than I thought.

------
milansm
Shameless plug, but this synchronous vs asynchronous communication is exactly
what I wanted to solve with my Slack app
([https://www.qdochat.com/](https://www.qdochat.com/)). I was thinking of
building a chat-like communication tool, but to be asynchronous by design. I
settled with the Slack app for the time being.

~~~
im3w1l
Your plug is ineffective, because after reading this comment I still have no
idea what your app does.

~~~
milansm
Yes, you're right. Your comment is much appreciated. I'll certainly act upon
it and work on improving my (personal project) marketing skills.

BTW, put simply, qdochat.com is Pomodoro technique for Slack teams.

------
ergothus
I'm shocked at many of the responses here, when people will also complain
about hostility towards remote workers.

Slack is a vital part of my working, PARTICULARLY when one of the parties is
remote. Sure, as this article is saying, having some space to not be
interrupted is a good thing - but that's hardly the same as saying USUALLY
having no synchronous option is good, much less EVER having a synchronous
option.

1) Email was great...until too much crap showed up in email and people stopped
reading it. Remove the synchronous option and you'll just have another form of
email. The Mythical Man Month talks about communication overhead -

2) The vast bulk of my slack communication is quick questions/answers. Sure,
an interruption is annoying, but usually well worth it if it unblocks someone.
(and when that someone is me, I value it much more). The value here tends to
vary in proportion to someone's quick response time. I have a few coworkers
that wont' check Slack more than once or twice a day. I hate having to work
with them on anything, and we tend to have more scheduled meetings that are
far less efficient. Others can be counted on to respond within 10 mins, and
usually within a min - working with them is a breeze.

There is definitely a number of tricks to adopt and etiquette to follow...just
like any form of communication. It can be used poorly and have more costs than
benefits, or well and have the reverse.

My tricks:

* I replaced the default notification sound with something less jarring. Basically a gentle sound that clues me in to glance at the notification. If it's not something I need to respond to, I'm usually not pulled out of flow. This is a huge difference.

* When that notification is still too much, and/or someone starts a detailed chat about something I don't care about, `/dnd 10min` tells slack to shut up for a bit, without me having to tinker with settings and worry about remembering to UN-tinker those settings.

* If using a Pomodoro technique, add in a scan of Slack between sessions. That's fast enough that most people are happy and not blocked long, but doesn't break up your work efforts. This advice is only partially tested, as I'm still struggling to adopt a routine.

* Many people will tell you to turn off notifications - I recommend AGAINST this unless you're using a technique like the last to make sure you don't miss things. Instead, make sure you're only in channels that are relevant to you - if you're getting pinged and aren't interested, the problem is not the tool. In particular, you want to manage the expectations about reaching you - if people think you aren't responding, they'll just get more annoying, not patient. I have coworkers that will often join into channels for related teams, get their answers, then leave...a process they repeat possibly multiple times that day, while I hang out in many, many channels. Both ways do the job well.

* I gave a presentation where I worked on effective ways to communicate with text. One of the best is to not ask A or B questions - instead ask yes/no questions.

Not: "Is the API key for foobar still in file.env? Or is it from the new
service call?" (You will be told "Yes" or "no" and have no idea what the
actual answer is)

Instead: "The API key for foobar is still in file.env? And not yet from the
new service call?" ("yes" or "no" will have a clear meaning)

This technique alone has taken a big bite out of my frustrations in using
slack (and any other communication) and reduced unnecessary traffic, though it
takes some practice.

I responded to Slack pings in the course of writing this :)

~~~
ergothus
I missed one trick - "Remind me". you can tell Slack to ping you about any
message at a later time. This is great someone asks something that involves
more time/effort than I can give right now. two clicks and I'm back at work
but confident that the matter won't be lost. The options are (too) limited,
but 20 mins, 1 hour, 3 hours, tomorrow, or next week do cover MOST of my
needs.

------
keithnz
Where I work Slack gets a little bit of use for some semi synchronous
conversations. Not a lot. The rest of the time it's mostly a way to copy paste
things to other people... links, code snippets, log files, screen shots

------
jvagner
Work with entirely remote staff.. I'll take the pain of Slack over the pain of
5+ hours of voice conferencing days, anytime.

Where's the "We had Skype/GTM/Hangouts/call-free days" articles?

------
weliketocode
I'll take slack over email by a country mile.

A lot (maybe even most or all) of the negativity around slack in this thread
is from misuse.

Slack is a tool. If it's becoming a distraction, change your approach.

~~~
moorhosj
Email is also a tool that can be misused.

~~~
seattle_spring
So is a circular saw. But between the 3 options, one is a clear winner for the
topic at hand.

------
qbaqbaqba
This date uses insane amount of notifications! Tell me more about removing
distractions!

------
pcmaffey
"A tool's utility is directly proportionate to the skill of the one wielding
it."

-Anon

