
How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy - steipete
https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2018/how-to-use-slack-and-not-go-crazy/
======
CiPHPerCoder
The most useful thing about Slack is you can press Shift+ESC (sometimes you
have to press it twice) to mark all conversations as read.

Inbox zero with two keystrokes. Whoever implemented that, I'd like to buy a
coffee someday.

(Also, I discovered this because I use Ctrl+Shift+ESC instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del
to bring up the Windows Task Manager immediately without going through the
intermediary screen that pops up, and one day, I missed Ctrl.)

~~~
stanlarroque
And I'd like to buy you a coffee someday for teaching me about the
Ctrl+Shift+ESC shortcut.

~~~
drather19
Make that two coffees!

~~~
nkantar
At least three.

Or other beverages, really!

------
matchbok
It amazes me how popular Slack is. Terrible performance, constant
interruptions, horrible threads.

Here's an exercise. You and your coworker discussed plans for a project in a
large channel 3 weeks ago. You need to get all that information and give it to
someone else. How do you do it? You can't. It will be interspersed with a
bunch of other nonsense from other people and isn't grouped or organized in
any sane manner.

This whole "chat" in workplace thing does nothing to actually get work done.

~~~
dewey
What's the alternative though? I really don't like Slack but I don't see
another great way of doing it.

\- Face to Face: No record, even harder to give to someone

\- Wiki: Goes stale pretty quickly

\- E-Mail: Same problem, slower, as distracting as Slack

~~~
gsich
IRC gateway from Slack. But they closed it down because <insert random
bullshit PR message here>.

~~~
dewey
I also prefer IRC but in this case it doesn't really improve anything. The
opposite really, no build-in search, no easy onboarding, no central logs,...

(Yes, I know I can build all this with ZNC, ELK or by using IRC cloud but that
doesn't solve the issue about chat vs. some other system)

~~~
gsich
But in Slacks case, that would all be there. With IRC.

But that's in the past. Slack is now a company with a single purpose (chat)
and they can't even do that right. Just look at the bloated "application"
(browser).

------
bachmeier
It seems every "how to do Slack right" post emphasizes that you shouldn't use
Slack as a chat service. Well that's what it is. Why not use email for the
beefier conversations that don't need to take place right away, and use chat
for what it was intended?

Chat is great for the occasional situation where you want to have a
conversation about something, you'll have a bunch of short messages back and
forth, and you want to keep a record of the conversation. Putting other stuff
in there just clutters things up. Slack is a great replacement for Reply All
with 20 email addresses. It's not so good as a replacement for other things.

~~~
jasode
_> It seems every "how to do Slack right" post emphasizes that you shouldn't
use Slack as a chat service._

Maybe other posts devolve to that but this post is different. The common
repeating pattern he's pointing out is _others_ misusing it for low-quality
communication and suggesting some settings to get some sanity back.

It's similar to previous advice about old technologies that others misuse
where you had to counteract it with tactics to gain productivty. E.g. Phones -
turn off ringer and manage voice mail. Email - set automatic
category/priority/junk filters.

~~~
bachmeier
The author says:

"It’s very easy to overuse DMs and see Slack as a real-time chat."

"We encourage people to be mindful about notifications. No DM is so important
that it can’t wait half an hour. In fact, I see this still underused. Slack
has a Do Not Disturb feature and Atlassian’s HipChat successor, Stride, made
this one of its cornerstones, which they refer to a “Focus Mode.” If something
is really urgent, people will call you on your phone. Everything else can wait
a bit. Uninterrupted time is important — don’t let Slack take that away from
you because someone is bored and asks you how your day is."

To be clear, the author does say that you should sometimes consider sending an
email. My point is that the emphasis is on using Slack as something other than
chat, but that's really its main use case.

~~~
jasode
_> My point is that the emphasis is on using Slack as something other than
chat, but that's really its main use case._

I see what you mean. I think of 2 styles of "chat" ... (1) a vacuous AOL AIM
or Facebook Messenger style chat or (2) a business-related channel chat.

The (1) is replicated in Slack by abuse of DMs. However, the author didn't
seem to be discouraging (2). (Author wrote at the top, _" but ultimately, we
decided we want to keep using Slack."_)

What happens is many workers bring a casual "Facebook chat" etiquette to Slack
which negates how _meaningful_ business chat can work. That's why I didn't
think the author wrote contradictory advice. (Similar to how the advice to
turn off the phone ringer is not contradictory to the power of voice calls --
because sometimes one needs uninterrupted time.)

------
minor3rd
I literally mute every channel except my direct team's channel. If you need
me, @ me baby.

~~~
jrootabega
Not really sufficient, unfortunately. People will always abuse this and
mention you whenever they feel like it, without thinking if it really needs
immediate attention. The only solution is disabling notifications entirely.

~~~
ravenstine
If it were email, those same people would abuse email. I don't think what
you're saying is really a problem with Slack. Those people you're referring to
are disrespectful morons.

~~~
saltcured
I think the issue is that people already learned how to avoid going crazy with
email. A large part of that is reading it in batches and not getting any
notification when messages arrive. Some other people are bothered by this and
seem to forever seek a way to worm their way back into your foreground
attention.

Slack conflates mentioning someone with notifying someone. Some of my
coworkers use mentions like metadata. They think they are creating a better
informatics resource by mentioning people by their Slack id instead of their
name. They had no intention of it actually sending an immediate notification
to interrupt anybody.

They see Slack more like some kind of wiki and not like a chat system. I see
Slack as a chat system and an even more worthless wiki than all the other
wikis everyone creates and then abandons due to editorial debt. Unfortunately,
we don't get to join different Slack systems with entrance exams to filter out
the wrong sort of user...

------
e40
And yet there are many of us that use Slack in a way that is not intrusive,
doesn't stress us out and adds incredible value. (I am unaffiliated with
Slack, the company.)

I recently started paying for it, after having used it free at my company for
several years. We wanted full comment history. I will say, the bonus of video
calls doesn't work at all, and I still pay zoom.us for that. (Yes, did a
customer support interaction, told them my problems, they thanked me. They
have a lot of work to do. Or, they should just purchase or merge with
zoom.us.)

------
nrjames
I'm reminded of this Agile Bits blog post about "curing" themselves of Slack.

[https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-
addic...](https://blog.agilebits.com/2016/04/19/curing-our-slack-addiction/)

~~~
steipete
Thanks for the link - it's linked in the post as well, certainly interesting
to know. We also have someone working at our company who previously worked at
1Password and is really happy that he can use Slack again.

~~~
nrjames
Slack is the epicenter of all manner of communication problems where I work,
and sadly, we have not yet figured out how to solve the problems. We have no
remote employees, yet the 30 of us, who all sit right near each other, spend
all day Slacking. I believe about 85% of messages are Direct Messages. It's
extremely frustrating.

~~~
dberg
This x 1000. I constantly remind my team to favor face to face communication
where possible. We have peopl hipchat each other sometimes literally sitting
across the desk from each other. It creates such a frustrating "i spend half
my day in chat" culture i just cant imagine the productivity drain.

~~~
jasode
_> to favor face to face communication where possible. We have peopl hipchat
each other sometimes literally sitting across the desk from each other_

I understand your preference for face-to-face but one reason some prefer text
chat is to minimize the ambient noise level in the office so as to not disturb
others.

For me, one problem with face-to-face (and voice calls) is I often end up
having to take notes and _transcribe_ what the person is saying to me.
Instead, if you just send me a text chat or email, it saves me the step of
being your secretary to type in what you just told me.

------
gnu8
No one should be using slack at all. I understand that it fills use cases that
email and irc don’t, but that is no excuse for letting all of your
communications be owned by some other company. What if slack accidentally or
deliberately denies access to your data? What if they choose to use it for
their own purposes or disclose it to some third party? What if they get hacked
by Russia?

~~~
LinuxBender
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But it could be.

It's actually worse than what you described. By default, users can install
integrations and applications that extend legal contract of your company to
fly-by-night third parties that can obtain access to all public channels that
any user of their integration is a member of. We locked this down, but most
companies don't realize the legal, privacy and security risks they are
accepting.

So Slack itself does not need to get hacked by anyone. The framework by design
facilitates this and removes Slack from legal responsibility. Your
organization takes on this legal risk and the users in your org decide your
legal fate (unless you lock down integration / third party apps). I mention
legal fate, as many companies are using Slack for ChatOps, automation,
discussing customer issues and much more.

~~~
Rjevski
I’m not sure how is this different from an employee copy/pasting confidential
data in an email and sending it off to a third-party. Will you also blame
email clients for making it “too easy” to leak data to third parties?

~~~
LinuxBender
This is not about me blaming anyone. This is about educating folks that the
shiny new "app" they installed is relaying data to a 3rd party and it may not
be clear to people the legal and privacy ramifications of doing so. They must
also be made aware that the 3rd party has no legal agreement with them so they
are dealing with 3rd party data processors. I can assure you that most legal
and HR departments have no idea that Slack does this.

------
s3r3nity
In two companies where we had piloted Slack, I led successful campaigns to
transition away from it.

Combining your choice of Email / IM client (Gmail / Hangouts or Outlook /
Skype) satisfies 99% of use cases for Slack.

Overall we were less stressed and didn't miss a beat. I'm sure there are
industries / companies working in areas that it makes sense - but I don't
think it just works for everyone by default in the same way that IM and Email
do.

~~~
e40
I refuse to use Skype because of this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security#Eavesdropping_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security#Eavesdropping_by_design)

I also remember a ToS change that allowed MS to listen in for _quality control
purposes_.

~~~
gsich
The same problem exists in Slack, there is no E2E-encryption. And you can't
self host it.

~~~
e40
Agreed. Hopefully they will add this. I'm currently betting on the fact that
Slack is small and it's less likely that the NSA has a direct backdoor into
their systems. I would bet a lot of money that the NSA has a backdoor directly
into MS Skype servers. I even hypothesized that they paid MS to purchase Skype
from Ebay, because right after the sale MS changed from peer-to-peer to
client-server.

Didn't the Snowden leaks say that Skype had been used to track terrorists?

~~~
gsich
The official reason is that "search would not work", but I don't know if this
argument holds. Others can do search too. There is no need to search
serverside when you have all messages on the client too.

By judging their client application, I doubt the serverside looks much better,
so a direct backdoor might not even be needed.

------
inertiatic
My team recently started using slack again and I'm finding it extremely
lacking.

Whoever made the decision to use it cheaped out and didn't pay for it, so our
history on channels is just getting lost, while I can still search for useful
info or tips from 2 years ago on Gchat.

You can argue that this is the business model, but that is a shitty business
model then. Sell features that further empower a team, don't intentionally
remove one of the largest benefits of communicating in writing.

But what really pissed me for the past few months is the fact that you are
unable to mute specific people. I recently had to coach a junior person, who
despite being bright, fun etc. just failed to take to heart that they
shouldn't interrupt someone to ask for something they could figure out
themselves by looking around some, or that smiling emojis a minute after they
got their answer was an additional interruption. This lack of a basic feature
caused me weeks if not months of agony, making me more angry than I should be
towards a person that didn't really deserve it, making me worried about my
performance etc.

~~~
whorleater
>our history on channels is just getting lost

my company actually pays for slack but had to enable limited history, since
developers kept on writing stuff that should be in wiki's or documentation in
slack and relying on the search.

~~~
yoz-y
This kind of shows that people just want to write stuff and search for it
later, rather than spend time organizing it. Gmail and Google Drive encourage
this behavior too.

Of course for somebody who just comes in, this is pretty suboptimal.

------
consumethreads
dont use it ... if a production is actually not making your life better why
tie yourself down to it.

just use what works, force slack to innovate

~~~
s3r3nity
Not sure why you're getting downvotes - it's a reasonable question to ask:
"why use something that makes you crazy / stressed out?

Not to set up a straw-man, but I'd imagine a similar reaction if someone wrote
a post titled "How to use Facebook and not get depressed," the gut-reaction is
"why use it if it's making you feel bad?"

~~~
ben_w
A good question. The most powerful answer (for both examples) is because
other-people-using-it makes its use by you necessary to get things done.

~~~
consumethreads
and thats where my quesiton is not for the employees but for the employers.
Why are you choosing to use a product in your company that has no use.

If it had use then it wouldnt make people "crazy". It would make them happy.
This inherently leads me to believe it has no use.

Personal experience, there is no golden rule to these things. Email , slack ,
google calendar. You eventually need to build your own relationship with these
things and be adult enough to maintain that relationship (inbox at 0),
seperate it from your emotions and be prepared to toss it to the side for in
person conversation.

Its not slack that is making people crazy its the policies of using it at the
company (or usually the lack there of) that make its benefit inconsistent. But
it seems slack has not improved the situation but only exacerbated it.

~~~
ben_w
Ah, I see. I agree with you in that case, but in my experience the true-but-
rubbish answer is generally that the decision makers had need to use a tool
and “common sense” made them force it on everyone else without any
consideration (a common problem whenever the justification is “common sense”).

------
newnewpdro
Slack eliminating the irc gateway has made it completely useless via low
bandwidth internet connections. It's awful, and seriously alienating when I'm
off grid for extended periods with a weak cell signal capable of ~14KiB/s. I
hate that nearly everyone has adopted this proprietary hosted garbage that
gives zero fucks for users outside the meat of their target market.

------
MisterTea
I've used slack. Worked at a small web shop of 10 people (one remote) which
used slack. Wanna know what it was used for, and still to this day? Posting
memes, cat and cute animal pictures, political news articles, funny articles,
food related stuff, youtube, gifs, ad nauseum.

The project dev channels were all dead as the shop was small enough where
people didn't need a bloated chat app for the few projects they managed. The
one remote worker was paired with a local dev and they did all their
communication via direct chat. Plus they still left access to the main random
channel to ex employees so everyone could keep in touch. So there was an
additional dozen people posting crap all day.

Slack was used for entertainment and distraction. I think the "modern" web
chat idea is more of a distraction than help. IRC might be primitive but it
does what it was made for without the distraction of gifs, memes, videos and
other nonsense.

~~~
imglorp
Large shop, checking in. We pay for it and have around 1500 technical people
on ours, all spread out in a dozen locations. It lets us work as if we're all
in the same office.

One misconception is that slack is not "chat", it's not like IRC. It's more
like groupware when used as intended. It handles things like files or code
samples, extensibility like webhooks and bots, fine grained notification
preferences, decent search across channels or by other criteria. Screen
sharing and conference calling is decent if immature. We have a channel for
each team, a channel for any big issues that pop up (they get archived), a
channel for each product, etc. and yes channels for screwing around. Corporate
version has search and archive for Sarbox/HR reqs.

There are other products. IRC can only do a few of these things, with many
requiring expert scripting to accomplish.

------
djhworld
At work we have an enterprise contract with Slack, but the implementation is
really strange.

Before the contract, there were a lot of teams/departments using Slack, so
naturally an assortment of team workspaces started to accrue.

Once the enterprise contract came into place, those workspaces were integrated
under one company banner so you can sign up with one login and join any
company 'workspace'.

This means that if you need to talk to a team in a different workspace, you
have to open a new tab in your browser and then join that. This is annoying,
and is even worse when 'global' channels were introduced, because ANY
notification gets broadcast across all the workspaces you have open.

Even DMs, if someone DMs me my Firefox tab bar lights up red across 5
different tabs.

This is partly an organisational problem in the company, but I think Slack
should take some of the blame too to reduce these niggles

------
ironjunkie
I cannot wait for the day where slack will just die.

Or better, the day where people realize that Slack-style communication is most
of the time completely useless and actually hurst productivity.

I now see that people start to realize this more and more. Slack was so much
hyped a couple years ago that everyone had to use it to be cool. Now, people
reflect on it and they realize that it mainly brings constant buzz and
unneeded notifications. There is a use case for it, but for 99% of any serious
discussion, email is usually way better.

------
getrendevu
The author addresses how to reduce the amount of notification spam in slack,
but doesn't really get to the root of why there are so many notifications in
the first place.

At Rendevu ([https://rendevu.co](https://rendevu.co)), we think that's because
people are attempting to use slack for more than it is -- mainly, using it to
broadcast team information (documents / decisions / faqs), that then get
pushed above the fold in channels by memes / gifs / other chatter, and then
have to be reposted again and again.

We're building an intelligent feed that aggregates information from the tools
you already use (Gsuite / Trello / Slack), and gives your team one place to
stay on top of things. It's in alpha right now, but feel free to sign in and
try it at [https://rendevu.co](https://rendevu.co). Any feedback is much
appreciated :)

------
tlynchpin
There's no mention in TFA or here about Compact mode. Get into Preferences, in
"Messages & Media", in section "Theme" switch to "Compact". Now your slack is
more Lego and less Duplo.

------
mrpoptart
Better workflow:

Star every individual you talk to

Star channels you talk to often

Mute channels you only read occasionally

Occasionally close messages to people to clear the list.

Important things stay on the top, everything else moves to the bottom.

------
curry_maker
Use glip.com. Is slack on steroids.

