Slack is the worst (and best)
Best practices for the best workplace app when it spins out of control
Slack, hello. Please forgive the forthcoming critique. It is not your fault. As they say, “it’s not you, it’s me.” But alas, we are not breaking up (please don’t cancel our account). I am just narcissistically streaming some consciousness here. You’re busy anyway, you won’t read this.
Finally a good communication tool
When it comes to consolidated internal communication, Slack > email, iMessage, WhatsApp, phone calls, video calls, twitter, whatever… probably combined. Individually all these other tools are amazing, civilization alternating technological breakthroughs and have an important place in how we communicate with each other personally and within our businesses. This is about business, which is what Slack’s intended use case is.
Slack’s functionality makes it incredibly easy to communicate ideas and collaborate in real time as well as asynchronously. With the assistance of emojis, gifs, great bots and playful channels; it is a critical tool in building culture within distributed, multi-timezone teams. Thanks Slack!
Too much of a good thing?
Yesterday and the day before I had video calls (because those are super important pieces of a company’s communication culture) with some key folks on the team. Everyone is key, but you know what I mean, and that’s what sparked this quick jotting of the words.
Like email, Slack gets out of control. That instant gratification of being able to ping anyone, anywhere in the world, at any moment about any insignificant (or significant) thought our question stifles autonomy and productivity. Think about it. I have a quick question. I can (a) solve it for myself; (b) ask someone in slack and tag them or; (c) ask an entire channel in slack and tag multiple people. Lazy Blake thoughtlessly hits “c” regularly.
::snaps rubber band on wrist::
How about a task? Oh, I’ve got a good idea! It’s probably the best idea anyone has ever had. Do I (a) add it to our project management tool (Notion or Jira), write out a full description of its moving parts and why its important, score its priority, impact and time to execute; (b) type out an ambiguous single-sentence request in Slack (in this case from the CEO) and tag one person; or (c) same as “b” but no vowels and multiple tags and a followup email. I think you get the drift.
Conclusion
I know, you’re glad this is almost over too.
Slack is amazing, but makes it too easy to embed laziness and recency bias in the company culture. Recent tasks and ideas take precedent over deep work and little shots of dopamine replace the warm enveloping oxytocin of long term accomplishments. This is especially true when tasks, ideas and questions are coming down from the top (or in our organization coming along laterally from the side).
Tag one person, not multiple. Your worst case and best case are the same with multiple tags which is that multiple people think they own the request and the job gets done three times, or everybody thinks everybody else owns it and nothing gets done. Sometimes nothing is better than something.
Try to answer the question before you ask it. “Here is my question, here is what I think the answer is.”
If it’s not a priority, keep it to yourself, add it to a backlog, or try to forget about it. We horde ideas sometimes. In my case it is a hodgepodge of control, ego, fomo, and probably some stuff that happened when I was 5 years old (everything always seems to lead there).
If you get tagged in a question or a task; ask yourself, “is this a priority?” If it’s not, say “no.” If it is, ask “can I delegate this?” If it requires training, “can I do it in a 5 min loom video with some light documentation?”
We didn’t discuss this on the call(s) but we have in the past and that is if there is a thread that has 20 comments or has been going on for 2 days pick up the easy to use slack video call feature and make a f***ing call. Those still have a lot of utility.
Our easy access to dopamine pulls us off track, regularly. I ping someone on a task, dopamine hit; I knock something small off my list; yum, dopamine. Someone smart once told me “less is more, and more is less.” I wrote it down and read it maybe 100 times over a week or so period before it sunk in. Get out of the weeds to think creatively and big picture. Make space for that. Do deep work that creates lasting impact. Spend 3 hours working on something that has big, repeatable long term potential instead of doing 100 small things in those three hours (especially, as my colleague Steve pointed out, if those 100 things aren’t laser focused on the company’s priorities). Turn off alerts and red badges, close slack regularly. Get shit done.
Then return and throw your favorite meme at any number of the 50 threads awaiting your feedback.
Note to self, conclusion seems to be longer than the entire article.