I noticed a while ago I have a problem with Slack. It is by far the biggest source of distraction at work for me. I work as a Tech Lead so I need to be among other things available to my team and to a degree on top of things. That implies following many topics, keeping the alignment, propagating information and correcting incorrect information. But then Slack makes it so easy to go down the rabbit hole of following and contributing to all kinds of conversations and before you know it the day is gone and little was done on the side of actual work. One may feel busy and useful and one can argue that a lot of people were helped but that is not what a whole day should look like.
After reading Cal Newport's Deep work two years ago I restarted my efforts to have distraction free time for deep, focused work as that is where most value is created in engineering (planning every half an hour of the day up front helps a lot). I would also recommend actually doing the Eisenhower matrix (the urgent unimportant vs. the not so urgent but important) on a piece of paper and try to quantify what and why is so important or urgent. You may find that being on Slack does not score that high as the reality at times shows us.
Additionally, Slack does not make itself easy to ignore (probably by design). Even if you turn the notifications off a blue/red dot will lit on the tray icon. When you open Slack you will see "more unread" shining at you in all directions. Being used to zero inbox it does not come to me naturally to leave highlighted channels unopened and mentions of my name unread. So let's see what can one do to keep some level of sanity and work throughput with Slack being the main channel of communication in the company.
How often?
The most important question to ask is: How long can a message stay unread? Five minutes, five hours, five days? If you say five minutes and truly believe that you cannot stay away from Slack for more than that you have a trouble I cannot help with. I believe that two hours is a reasonable number (people go for lunch and may have a meeting around lunch). Also I would highlight here our CPO, Georgie Smallwood, who's leading by example by having her Slack status set to "I check Slack once a day". So assuming you have a number you can adjust and try my current Slack routine:
- Start the day by not opening Slack and working for an hour (One uninterrupted hour of work for free. Think of it as if you came one hour later to work).
- Set timer for ten minutes.
- Open Slack and check what's up. Since the time is running I join only conversations where I really have to.
- Anything that is on fire so I need to drop my plans? If yes, check if it is really the case and if so do it.
- Time is up. Close Slack.
- Set timer for one hour.
- Rinse and repeat.
One common failure mode is that I would open a Slack the moment I realize I need to write to someone. I make a note instead. It also gives my ten minutes on Slack purpose as I typically actually need to write to few people.
Which channels?
I would recommend leaving as many channels as you sensibly can and mute as many of the remainder as you can. Than star the few you want to really pay attention to.
How?
Just how to use Slack really? I am not alone in concluding there is a hell lot of noise over signal. It feels overwhelming trying to keep up with all the conversations. Actually, Slack allows you to have ten parallel 1-1 conversations while trying to follow up what's going on in 20 different rooms full of random people. Try to do any work in such a setting.
Curated channels
But one problem at the time. One thing one can actually do is to set ground rules for how people communicate in channels. Slack offers threading. That is great but if not curated it only helps with not having interleaving messages on different topics. It still makes you go through all the threads if you want to know what's going on. My ideal channel looks like this:
- Any message is either standalone announcement or a start of a thread.
- Start of a thread contains description detailed enough to know what is it about.
- The person starting a thread is responsible for adding conclusion once discussion is over so every thread has a conclusion on it.
1-1 conversations.
It does not hurt to reiterate that Slack has this neat feature for calling including a video-call. I try to be mindful of the time I spend in a written conversation and where it is still useful to articulate better my points in written and have the time to think about the problem at hand or collect more data and where I should jump on a call. That also solves the problem of having several long conversations in parallel and constantly context switching as calls can help resolve them.
Summary
- Turn it off
- Follow only what you absolutely must
- Curate channels
- Call more often
