I have never understood the appeal of Slack to replace/supplement email. It seems to me it is just another multi-channel inbox of messages and notifications. I’d rather manage my email than email AND Slack. I am able to manage emails well enough now that I seldom have more than 10 in my inbox at a time and virtually no spam, I don’t want synchronous communication, I prefer asynchronous so I can focus on deep work and the important. The only “Slack like” program I use is Asana, which enables communication within the platform for all projects and tasks, as well as documents. It is far more full featured than Slack and integrates seamlessly with email if/as needed.
“Due to the surfeit of communication Slack creates and the interruptions that causes, the very system meant to facilitate work actually prevents users from getting work done, causing a slew of other issues.”
I’m also sure that this is true as well, “The software, of course, isn’t entirely to blame. As I wrote in May, a lot of complaints about Slack’s impact on people’s lives arise from corporate culture and, in some cases, people’s own inability to set boundaries.” BUT, programs like Slack, in my opinion, tend to foster the corporate culture cited above because instant messages implies an expectation of an instant reply.
I’m sure, as the article points out, some benefit from Slack while others do not. I tried it and found email to be less intrusive and more productive. Obviously, everyone’s use case is different.
Employees want a way to have quicker, lower-expectation conversations than they feel they can have in email. One of Slack’s benefits is that it does an end run around the formality that can build up in an organization’s email use. I think this is the biggest benefit of Slack. When it is adopted in an organization, the organization usually sheds some old ways of working that were time-consuming. It may be that they then have to walk back their use of Slack, but they’ve still gained the one-time advantages of adopting it.
There’s also a minor productivity benefit to not having to process chats. You can just glance at a whole screen and be done with it, forever. It’s like if email was sent in auto-destructing, FYI mode by default. The time savings from this adds up.
Response time in chat is also effective. Email can kill a synchronous conversation due to sending/checking delays. Good chat, like Slack, is instant and you can really work closely with someone through it. Unlike the phone, you can work closely with two people at once. Maybe three or four if you’re good. This kind of concentrated shallow work should create more time for deep work.
Chat channels organized by topic are also better than email threads on those same topics. Yes, topic/interest channels should probably be muted by default. But, anyone can join and review the history. And if the topics are labeled well enough, anyone in the organization will feel free to participate in them, which is good for cross-training, avoiding silos, etc. (For example, we have a video-marketing channel instead of posting our video marketing ideas in the digital team channel, even though digital is the most interested.)
Also, people seem to feel more free to create topical channels than they do to create discussion projects in PM software.
Apologies for the lack of organization in this comment, but these are some of the reasons I think Slack has benefitted the places I’ve worked.
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t get Slack, or Yammer, or all the similar systems. I tried a a year-long pilot having one of my teams exclusively use Yammer (which was just plain terrible) for a while and then Slack (which was prettier and more functional). It was an epic fail. Everyone was annoyed by it. We ended up having to manage both Slack and e-mail because Slack was not enough to eliminate the use of e-mail. I couldn’t permanently get anything out of Slack to save to my file system. It was a total pain. E-mail works really well. It can be a pain to process and manage, no doubt. I complain about it, myself. But it’s more useful than, and has the least amount of friction (in terms of sending, receiving and finding messages and attachments) of anything else I’ve tried.
Sorry to be negative. I’m just sharing my experience. I get that lots of teams seem to really LOVE Slack.
I despise Slack. It’s like being in a room where everyone is talking at once, along with the residue of previous conversations.
If that isn’t enough, it can interrupt you at any time, and puts you at everyone’s beck and call.
Slack has been amazing for myself and the three other teachers on my team. We teach virtually and live across the state. It has replaced all of our email communication and it has the added benefit of feeling connected to my colleagues. I get that asynchronous can be advantageous and the one guy in our team who works better that way has developed the expectation that it isn’t immediate for him.
This works well for us because we are a relatively small team and everyone has bought in. (We also understand and use threads, which helps so much) It will be easier to expand with more of our arts team in the future because we have made it normal for us.
Personally, I’m still not close to being convinced (and use it sparsely as a result). And I’ve disabled any and all notifications, be it on mobile, in browser or native app
We don’t use Slack at work but a self hosted instance of RocketChat (very similar), there are definitely advantages. My boss won’t send me an email to ask me to open the door if he’s in a meeting and someone needs to get in, but a chat message works just fine. If I miss it then I miss it, but often I see it in time to let the person outside into our offices. In particular after moving from a place where most of us were on one floor and in close proximity to being spread out over 5 floors it’s no longer easy to just pop by someone’s office to ask a question on the way to/from the bathroom/kitchen, so chat serves us well in that respect.
I also find chat to have some advantages over forums - chat moves quickly and is great for one off questions, whereas a forum is longer living. Especially with my degree forum participation contributes towards your grade, but sometimes you have a “dumb” question you don’t particularly want on the record and chat is nice for that. The same can be applied to email vs chat too.
I have to agree with @Wolfie on this one. Let me rewrite what you like about Slack:
I can email a quick question to my technical peers “how do I do x?”, and instantly, or in a few minutes, I have several very workable options from different people with different knowledge and experience.
If I can’t wait for the answer (phone calls, client work, other work), I can check my email later and find the info waiting for me.
If people want to further the conversation, they can Reply All (multi-user collaboration).
This could also be done with a listserv, a Discourse instance, GroupMe, text messaging, etc.
For me this is the problem with this type of conversation via email. If I get an email I feel like I’m expected to respond, rather than anyone it was sent to, and if the person or people who reply before me don’t hit reply all then you could be wasting your time sending the same answer, or cause confusion by sending a contradictory answer. With chat there is no option to skip reply all unless you deliberately go to a 1:1 chat instead, so everyone can see previous answers, and there is much less of an implication that everyone who has received the message should reply.
All of this comes down to the culture of where you work of course!
I certainly fall in the camp of being a fan of Slack. I disagree that it is the same as email. We have a small, dispersed team of 11 and we rarely use email internally anymore. We have channels by topic for some discussions, DM’s for conversations that only need to involve particular parties in our organization, and I can ping someone in Slack while on a call with a customer and get feedback in real time. Two of us work in the same office and I can be on a call and get input from my partner in realtime. We have worked hard to get our team not to use their email inbox as their to-do list and only process emails in blocks during their day, otherwise they can’t get their work done. We use Slack very effectively and add some other apps in to the program to make it even more effective.
That is exactly how email lists work. I actually miss that system and forums, whole nice, require more effort to come in and view. I am using slack for the Mastermind group but I see no real benefits to it over an email system or a forum. It just gives me one more place I have to go to keep up with stuff.
So many good points here… I am in the slack>email camp, but I have to wonder if it’s all because of the ways companies I’ve worked for have used the tools. In other words, nurture over nature
We use Microsoft Teams in my workgroup, which is extremely similar to Slack.
In some cases it’s great for a couple of things: Ephemeral communications that expire in a day or less. Easily transitioning between group and 1:1 messaging. Maintaining communications between smaller subgroups, such as a team of people going the a particular conference. Teams is great for those things. Also, some of us use it to share progress on the workday.
Big obstacle: Our workgroup ranges in age from 30s to 60s. Some of my most valuable colleagues are in their 60s. I’m thinking of one particular colleague – he’s in charge of of the most valuable revenue-producing businesses in our group, extremely knowledgeable and a sweetheart too. And he doesn’t use Teams, and nobody’s going to tell him he has to. Same for a couple of other extremely valuable colleagues, aged 30s and 40s and up. So in practice you have some people on Teams, some people on email, and some people on Skype for Business, which is a platform for 1:1 messaging that we’re moving off of but slowly.
Y’know, I used to get a lot of both professional and social value from e-mail listservs. Of course there are still a few of them out there but they’re a far cry from what they once were. Kind of a shame that that model has mostly fallen by the wayside.
I unsubscribed from a few listservs because the topics just got repetitive. When you see the exact same question posted a half-dozen times a week because people don’t bother reading the FAQ or well-written documentation, it’s hard to maintain interest. Stack Overflow kind of replaced it for me, at least you can close a topic with a pointer to the canonical answer.
I don’t use Slack for human to human communications. Like everyone else has stated here, it’s like going to a convention and trying to have a one-on-one conversation with all kinds of stuff going on around you. Just doesn’t work for me.
However, using Slack as a destination and point for alerts that can then be used by other automations to make things happen behind the scenes is how I use this tool.
I don’t use Slack for human to human communications. Like everyone else has stated here, it’s like going to a convention and trying to have a one-on-one conversation with all kinds of stuff going on around you. Just doesn’t work for me.
However, using Slack as a destination and point for alerts that can then be used by other automations to make things happen behind the scenes is how I use this tool.
Having bought look at particular channels and my Slack makes it easy to kick off automations with Zapier, Pushcut, AppleScript or any other automation tools.
push notifications and email are the primary means of receiving alerts in my channels.
Super fun way to get things to happen without a ton of me needing to sit at a keyboard.
I have come to agree with something like your point of view. You are right pretty much in the outlines of what you say.
The real problem in my view and one that is becoming a real headache for me is that every communication is now ‘on record’. Well selected chunks of it, which can be as misleading as regular ‘gossip’ are saved as ‘gotchas’.
If I really need to talk I use email and focus my remarks that way now. I will also use Confide app. People can still photograph a message, or even write it down, however it is far harder than the current tendency to ‘screen shot’ gotchas.
I am off Twitter and Facebook for similar reasons.
We really need to get control of some of this stuff. The kind of folk who tend to be on these fora are usually pretty straigtht people I have found, usually competent and helpful. Often naive about the sneaky loser habits of a lot of their colleagues who are job justifiers, sneaks or even malign actors of some kind looking for weak links socially.
This kind of concentrated shallow work should create more time for deep work.