

Slack, the Ultimate Workday Distractor - guyroberts206
http://www.guilded.co/blog/2015/08/29/slack-the-ultimate-distractor.html

======
dsr_
On my work desktop, I have Pidgin running. There are accounts connected to

    
    
       Google (friends and family)
       IRC (technical channels)
       our company XMPP servers (in-house chat, primarily a workgroup channel but also side conversations with individuals)
       and a Slack channel via their IRC interface, for Rands's management discussion channel
    

None of them are distracting, because there are no sound notifications
enabled. There are no pop-up notifications. If someone mentions my handle,
that channel tab highlights blue; if there's new random chat, the tab
highlights red.

I assume that there is always content available, and when I have time for it I
glance over and see if there's something blue. If I have more time available,
I check on something red.

If I'm working from home, I log in to those accounts on my working machine at
home. Same procedures.

If there's an actual alert, the phone in my pocket will start making noises -
a specific noise that I don't use for anything else, in fact.

It took a while to gain trust in all that, but now that I have it, I don't
have any anxiety from checking chat or email or what-have-you: of course
there's going to be content, and it's not going to be an emergency, because an
emergency is always signaled by noise.

~~~
nextos
Slightly offtopic, but how do you handle the fact that Google doesn't
implement offline XMPP deliveries? I mean, if someone writes to you while you
are offline, the message will get lost. You can see it on Gmail inbox,
sometimes...

~~~
dsr_
I'm always online. At home, my desktop runs 24/7\. At work, my desktop runs
24/7\. My phone is in my pocket, unless it's in my hand or on the table next
to my bed.

But XMPP is not an emergency contact protocol. If I miss something, oh well.

If you needed me in realtime, there's a cellphone number which will do that.
For anything else, I will possibly see your message (XMPP, IRC, Slack) or I
will definitely eventually see your message (email).

------
d23
I recently learned about /mute, which is a godsend. It lets me keep those
channels open that I'm interested in, but lets me avoid getting a little red
circle in my taskbar every time a message appears in them. I keep 80% of my
Slack channels muted now, with only the really important ones unmuted.

~~~
mmanfrin
I'm sincerely annoyed with Hipchat because it does not have a feature like
this, or configurable notifications per room. We've got our main chat (which I
want to monitor), and then a room for support (which I don't really care about
unless I'm directly pinged). Unfortunately, I can't turn off the latter
without turning off the former. Very annoying.

~~~
marcins
Customisable per-room notifications for HipChat have been in Beta for the web
client since July: [https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/07/13/customizable-room-
notifi...](https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/07/13/customizable-room-
notifications-now-in-beta-boom/)

~~~
mmanfrin
So, as of a _month_ ago it's available to _beta_ users of the _non-app_
version. I.e., it still doesn't have per-room notification settings in an
actual use case unless I downgrade down to the web client.

------
troutwine
Perhaps it's an abrasive trait, but I really am not over-concerned about being
available. That is, I check my work email once in the morning and I flip
through my team's Slack channel when I'm directly pinged or after coming back
from a time-out mini-break. Other communication mediums I check even less
frequently.

Folks who feel compelled to be highly-available, what's the draw? Is it a
nervous compulsion, a sense that you're going to miss out on something or yet
something I haven't even imagined?

~~~
munin
Here's a scenario. Someone sends you a message Tuesday morning, asking "hey
what is the best way to push data into this system." You are not available,
off in your fortress of solitude, so they wait for about 30 minutes to hear
back from you, they don't, and they proceed with reading documentation and
trying to figure something out. A day passes.

The next day, you look at their work and you exclaim "wow! this is going to be
really inefficient and cause problems with other features that I know are
coming!" and they say "well that's why I asked you..." and you reply "well,
I'm not concerned about being AVAILABLE..."

~~~
troutwine
That scenario wouldn't happen. If someone is sending me a message directly, in
my present organization, we're talking Slack. Sent directly, that'll be a ping
and I'll respond as soon as I notice which'll be in a few seconds. It's a
disruption, sure, but if you're reaching out directly it's important. If it's
_super_ important escalation to video-chat or in-person talk happens.

What I'm curious about is the regular polling model of availability. I could
have been more clear.

~~~
geofft
That assumes that they know you're the person to contact. In several cases I
know how to do something, but it's not totally clear to my coworkers that I do
and it's appropriate to contact me. Or, more commonly -- I know _someone_ on
the team knows how to make a system work, but I don't know who. (I don't think
you need to poll more frequently than every 30 minutes to make this work well
enough, so you can do Pomodoro-length blocks without checking every ten
seconds if someone else needs you.)

The other thing about this model is it encourages things to be personally-
directed disruptions. In a healthy, non-tiny engineering organization, there
are important parts of the system where multiple people understand the
subtleties (to avoid SPOF) but not _everyone_ understands the subtleties
(because they don't need it). Multiple pings will bother everyone for no good
reason, when only one of them needed to be bothered. But to avoid that, you
have to ensure that a broadcast query will probabalistically be answered by
one person who knows the answer.

~~~
manigandham
This isn't a problem. A company big enough where someone doesn't know who
handles what will already have a good chance of someone seeing the message.
Direct pings for immediate responses, otherwise a reply within an hour or two
is just fine.

Or if that really doesn't work, I'm sure the first incorrect direct ping will
redirect to the right person right after, it's not like you need to annoy
everyone in a massive blast. And big companies will generally have managers,
assistants and others who are more flexible and can deal with this very well
as general routers of communications.

------
takee
I can totally relate to this. We use a slack equivalent app at my workplace
and most of my days are spent trying to make sure I didn't miss an important
conversation or a critical issue that I could have helped debug, instead of
focusing my time and energy on the task at hand.

It does however help make the remote employees feel more in sync with the rest
of the team, because now you're not missing out on the important discussions
that would have happened in-person in the past, and you also have a chance to
get to know your employees a little more personally. I guess it depends on the
company culture to some extent but we seem to have moved all our water cooler
discussions to this app.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Yep, exactly. I used to think Slack was the best thing since sliced bread, and
now I keep pushing back to async communications like email to get my
concentration and productivity back.

~~~
Mithaldu
There's nothing about slack that makes it inherently more syncronous than
email, as long as you switch off all its dumb notifications to make it work
like IRC.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It feels, and this might just be my opinion, that Slack inherently has
different response speed expectations than email (or other async comm methods)
due to it being a chat client.

~~~
dasil003
I _still_ think Slack is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I agree
with you. If I need to send something non-time-sensitive to a specific person
I will still go to email or another channel (1:1 meeting, Basecamp message,
Trello card, ticket, etc) rather than sending an @mention.

If it's not specific to an individual, then I think dropping random things in
channels works reasonably well asynchronously as it lets everyone decide when
they have time to read the given channel, and of course it shows up in search
for later reference. Slack stretches the boundaries of real-time communication
quite a bit through clever design choices, but that's still its fundamental
nature.

------
reinhardt
Well said, even it it touches only on the distraction aspect of chat apps.
Reposting a comment I made recently:

"""

web chat is often (ab)used in a way that makes it the equivalent of global
variables for communication: if offers the path of least resistance for
sharing information (state) at the cost of making this information harder to
retrieve, search, structure, associate, leverage in the future. Or to try
another metaphor, it's the equivalent of dumping data on flat free-text files
instead of a relational database.

Web chat does away with two (at least) properties I have come to appreciate in
written communication: being asynchronous and contextual. Although modern web
chat systems typically work even when you're offline by sending notifications,
they're primarily a realtime system. There is the implicit or explicit
expectation that a chat message (especially a direct one) should be answered
asap, unlike an email or a tracker comment. As for context, there is little to
none. In more than one company I've seen chat effectively replace the
dedicated bug/ticket tracker system, with people polluting one or more
channels with intermixed discussions that would be better off as comments on
the ticket at hand. It's a mess for anything other than transient, throwaway
stuff you wouldn't mind purging after a few hours or days.

Looking forward for a "web chat considered harmful" blog post if there hasn't
been one already.

"""

------
dasil003
Regardless of how you do things, you're going to need to find a way to manage
distraction. Personally I'm an engineer turned CTO who used to spend 95% of my
time writing code, and now spends 75% of my time on management and "soft"
tasks, so I can directly relate to both sides of PG's famous Maker's vs
Manager's Schedule.

Every employee is going to need different amounts of space to do their job,
both due to the role and also because of personality. While Slack can destroy
focus, it actually has less potential to distract you then the people in your
office (whether that be colleagues, co-working space people, or
roommates/family at home). In all cases there need to be boundaries and
reasonable expectations, and there is no way to set those without some
dialogue and empathy happening.

Now, full disclosure, my team is distributed between SF and London with a long
tail of employees spread in a dozen other countries, so something like Slack
is essential to fill in for certain face-to-face communications. But even
setting distributed teams aside, Slack has some of the best notification
controls in the comm tools space. The granularity of the notifications and the
configuration options to show/hide/notify different channels and groups give
you an amount of control which no other tool I've seen affords. You definitely
have to dig into the Advanced and Channel Prefs in order to really dial this
in. I also use the Mentions tab, and use of Stars on Channels, People and
Messages to augment its async capabilities while still staying remarkably
available to help where I'm needed.

Of course this is far from a silver bullet and non-trivial to set up, but
going back to email would be unthinkable at this stage. I have pretty
sophisticated methods of avoiding distraction in email too, but it is
infinitely augmented by telling my team: "if the sky is falling DM me on
Slack". That way anyone on my team can get ahold of me at any time, and I
don't have to worry about a bomb in my email inbox. The problem with email is
that literally anyone in the world can email you at any time, and everyone
uses email in their own way, so there is no space to come to a common
understanding of how to use email. The only way to win at email is to define
on your own terms how you will use it to make _yourself_ the most productive
and not letting others' expectations drive your relationship to email. One of
the reasons Slack is able to "replace" email is because it gives a team a
private space to set up their own social norms that is isolated from strangers
and other companies who really shouldn't have a say in your priorities and
time management.

------
kirk21
To keep my sanity I turned off most of the notifications. Just can't stop
using Slack bots: [https://medium.com/the-freelancing-life/rise-of-the-slack-
bo...](https://medium.com/the-freelancing-life/rise-of-the-slack-
bots-5a7928d404e7)

------
LukeB_UK
We use Hipchat at work and I have it set to only notify me if I'm mentioned
(including @all and @here) or if someone directly messages me. My email
doesn't notify me when a new message comes in so I check that every so often
when I feel I need to rather than when I get interrupted by it.

------
mmaunder
No way. I don't know how our remote working team would live without slack. It
adds back the in-office style communication you have in the real workplace and
(more importantly) gives us a sense of culture that is sorely lacking in a
remote working environment. It's an essential tool - it's IRC with the missing
bits like search, website preview, file uploads and more. We've become heavily
reliant on it and even spin up consulting companies on our slack with access
to specific channels and that works well too.

If you want to avoid distraction, just avoid distraction by unplugging. Turn
off your phone, turn off slack notifications, lock your office door, hit the
Adderall, etc. (Joking about the adderall)

------
je42
Manager vs maker schedule issue. Slack is a tool - with quiet some
configuration regarding this. Has nothing really to do with slack. You get the
same issues when interrupting people in person. Or actually calling them on
their mobile.

------
kevan
My compromise is to turn off notifications for most group chats and rooms. I
still probably check chat every 15 minutes, but I choose when to check instead
of a notification breaking my train of thought.

I'm a big fan of using chat to see if someone is available to talk before
going over to their desk and interrupting, but if you only check it twice a
day there's no advantage to using it over email.

------
tericho
I would really like to see an auto-reply feature similar to email out-of-
office. Something you can set like "Back in 20 mins", "Coding until 4, PM if
urgent only". Would mute the notifications maintaining your productivity, and
your peers would still be in the loop instead of being ignored. Does anyone
know if this can be done with a bot?

------
mbesto
Same thing happened when companies adopted Yammer. Here we go again...

------
omginternets
Good conclusion with a terrible reactionary-sounding title.

I'll add that whoever invented pop-up notifications for the desktop should be
dragged away screaming and pleading, only to be silenced by a gunshot in the
distance.

