Our Week Without Slack

As someone having an IRC client open while working since around 15 years this is so mindboggling. (Well, everything regarding the buzz about Slack and how it&#x27;s a replacement for email, no it&#x27;s the best thing since sliced bread, no wait, it&#x27;s horrible.. etc.pp)<p>Why yes, of course you need to restrain yourself from chatting all day. And learn to ignore people or tell them you&#x27;re not able to talk to them right now - but it can still be immensely helpful to have your network of people available to help you solve your problems - because you&#x27;re also helping them solve their problems from time to time.

Wait, is Slack now so &quot;mainstream&quot; that it&#x27;s problematic and the cool thing to do is to get off it?<p>&gt; &quot;The longest I can go without checking it even if I&#x27;m incredibly busy is probably 10-15 minutes.&quot;<p>Well... don&#x27;t? Maybe close the app?<p>Our team is 100% remote and we use Slack and email constantly, but when somebody needs to finish some urgent task, we just close it, no big deal. Is having a bit of privacy and piece of mind frowned upon now?

They claim Slack is distracting while the picture at the top of the article is a bunch of people working in cramped quarters in an open office.<p>I think they have bigger fish to fry here.<p>Slack has a mute button. All that requires is self control. You can&#x27;t mute coworkers sitting too close to you. Even with headphones (which notice half the people in the photo are wearing) you can only somewhat filter out the distracting people.

It&#x27;s about what I expected in effect. Very distracting. There&#x27;s something to be said for making out-of-band communications easier than whatever is usually hard but still take work to reduce frivilous comms. My GPG I use for some chit-chat but mostly important conversations. The reason is that it&#x27;s a pain in the ass to use. I have to <i>work</i> to send a message. Even easier ones with passwords and such still take work. So, maybe take a little trouble to set up a thread with an expiration that drops out of it in an hour or 30 minutes or something. They&#x27;ll get trained to only use the tool for things that matter and to know if they receive something in it that it probably matters.<p>Only surprise was in the presentation where I forgot Adrianne was the writer as I read content first followed by author. Gets me to the goods plus eliminates various biases. I thought, &quot;What a bizarre response to a question about how Slack worked for their organization. Is this person trolling the feedback form?&quot; Lol.<p>Anyway, I think it was a nice reminder that it&#x27;s best to make interviewer&#x27;s questions stand out from the answers. A good, design pattern. One I recall was, before Q&amp;A begins, to say something like &quot;interviewer&#x27;s questions in (color here)&quot; with the rest a different color. I figured it out by the second statement with that name that I was reading the interview questions but it mentally interrupted flow in an otherwise good presentation. So, still worth mentioning and trying to avoid in the future.

(Per the picture in the article) I don&#x27;t think they pack them in close enough at those desks

I disagree with the article. Slack is invaluable for my needs as a software engineer. However, none of the people mentioned in the article are software engineers.<p>Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn&#x27;t seem very surprising to me.

Has anyone noticed how the Slack client seems to just consume resources. I don&#x27;t recall my IRC clients down the years use as much memory &#x2F; CPU as my slack client seems to do.<p>Surely there should not be too much computational overhead involved here or am I missing something?

Our teams are entirely remote, and slack fills in for some of the things we miss by not being in the same room. Async tech conversations, status and reachability, crisis coordination, a feed from various other systems, and some banter. I actually like that the free tier deletes messages; we have other tools (wiki, bug tracker) to serve as a permanent record, so everyone is clear that anything that needs to be documented should be written up elsewhere. If it didn&#x27;t exist, irc would for us almost fully replace it; it&#x27;s just a slightly nicer ux.

I like slack as a tool. How I used it mostly was for important things right then. We would have slack up and if something was posted you looked, because it was most likely urgent. No meme sending or idle chat allowed. I dont want my time wasted by looking at a stupid meme. Work and work only on slack is what works for us. (exception we use it when ordering lunch lol)

I too find it distracting. Sooo, I just left our channels with stupid memes and keep only the ones that provide the information I need to do my job. I don&#x27;t get how people can complain how distracting it is when your not obligated to stay in those channels. n=1 anecdote, but with my team in four offices on two continents Slack (or Hipchat) is valuable.

From the article: <i>I don&#x27;t miss it at all, at least not in terms of doing my job well. I miss the memes and the ~banter~.</i><p>On the other hand, from their picture, it appears that all their people are in the same room. They don&#x27;t really need an online system for this.

How do those people get any work done in a room like the one in the headline photo?

I&#x27;d quit the same day if I had to work in that office.<p>Exaggeration aside, how do you guys get anything done?

&gt; I felt a little bit like I was a freelancer again, which I think was kind of the point ... a lot of us are writers who ended up weighing in on every single little thing in Slack because it felt like that was our job when really it probably isn&#x27;t.<p>Over analysis leads to paralyzation, which isn&#x27;t necessarily a Slack problem. Sounds more like they are blaming the messenger rather than themselves, which is exceedingly easy to do in this day and age.<p>There&#x27;s a similar argument made for gun legislation, where the restriction in distribution of guns leads to less violence. People are still responsible for their actions, but other people&#x27;s actions (such as turning off Slack) lead to greater awareness that those actions will not be tolerated in a social group.