Death By a Thousand Pings, The Hidden Side of Using Slack (Article)
ref: https://medium.com/counter-intuition/the-hidden-side-of-using-slack-2443d9b66f8a
Alicia of Nava makes some really strong, well worded arguments against Slack despite the fact that they use it. Much of which mirrors my own thoughts
As someone who has intentionally cut nearly all social media use in recent months, Iāve been working on developing more awareness of social mediaās effects on me. I noticed that my usage of Slack was having a similar effect to social media.
I found myself compulsively checking Slack even when I had no need to. And as a result, I was in a constant state of distraction, and not just during work
I need a clear focused mind to do my job effectively. Yet, I felt I was losing control of my brain to the tool thatās supposed to help me.
A seeming paradox that Iām reminded of is that our greatest strengths are also the source of our greatest weaknesses.
Applied to Slack, its greatest strength: amazing ease-of-use, is also its weakness: ==making it far too easy for everyone to default to using Slack for communicating, even for all the myriad things that donāt make sense to use Slack to communicate==.
What seem like innocuous quick pings on Slack are often things that actually require deep thought and likely discussion, or require complex problem solving, or are requests for me to do a significant amount of work, and so on. Yet big or small, everything coming in through Slack shares the same compact shape, and ==worse, the same level of urgency.==
Cannot prioritize Slack
The only tools I have at my disposable to try to deal with notification overload areā¦
- mark as unread
- Slack reminder both of which just delay the problem. (I know many Slack add-ons exist to deal with this problem, but the value proposition and longevity of these add-ons is too iffy to ask the whole company to invest the necessary time and money into them. In comparison to email, there are many well-established built-in and external tools to help with prioritizing emails and attaining the elusive goal of inbox zero.)
Because Slack is so easy to use, the barrier to initiate a communication is greatly lowered. Just drop a thought into a channel, maybe add an emoji, and voila! Youāre now free to bask in the dopamine hits of getting emoji reactions and instant replies. You feel immediately validated as a productive valuable team member. It feels great!
With email, itās different. Before you hit Send, you have to think about a) exactly who you want to communicate your message to b) who else might also be interested in your message c) summarizing your message so itās clear why those people need to click on your message to read it d) writing in an organized way and perhaps adding a clear call to action e) (optional) figure out how to add an emoji and worry about it showing up weird like the dreaded āJā. Writing a good email is not that simple to do.
By using Slack, all the work you would otherwise put into writing such an email largely disappears. Cool, right? Not so fast.
That work doesnāt just disappear. ==That cognitive work is now dispersed on to all the people who come across your message in Slack.==
āš»This is a super solid point.
Each person now needs to figure out: a) is this message relevant to me? b) if so, how? c) do I need to take some action based on this message? d) should I ask for clarification on its relevance or whether I need to take some action? Oof. The work that would have gone into crafting an email can thus not only be passed on to the recipients in Slack, ==it is multiplied by the number of people in that channel.==
This also feels related to Slack is your real project management tool, or in general the idea that slack messages are kind of "todos".
By lowering the barrier to initiate communication, the hidden side effect is that Slack has the quiet capacity to exponentially increase communication overhead.
Resulting in much more voluminous, lower quality communication. Low quality communication has a multiplicative effect on communication overhead because it is imprecise and prone to being misunderstood.
Thus it generates even more communication to clear up the misunderstandings, all of which contribute to more cognitive overhead ==borne by the recipients of the communication==. At worst, there is a miscommunication, and people end up acting on wrong information.
Using Slack has the effect of feeling productive, when it may actually be extremely counter-productive.
This is my thought as well -> busy and fun are not productive.
While I remain skeptical that Slack can replace email, and I donāt believe Slack should
The sad thing is that Slack will and does replace e-mail because it makes the sender happy. Slack is optimized for the writer.
Good communication takes intention, thoughtfulness, and work, and those things donāt come for free simply with easier-to-use software.
I would even go so far as to say it actually makes it harder.
...As we continue to barrel down the path of exponentially more online communication, and dealing with tech companies using every trick available to grab at our extremely limited time and attention...
Yeah very true! Takes a lot of Digital Minimalism.
...for those of you that design and build software that affect millions of people: we, as technologists, wield incredible power over how people live their lives.
This is a great and daunting responsibility, which we often overlook as we focus on our immediate goals ā goals that often reduce down to how to make a small uptick in a graph somewhere. As engineers, ==we live by quantifiable results==, and by and large, we have good intentions to improve the software we create. While itās true that we improve what we measure, ==**itās also true that what weāre able to measure is an abstraction of something far less quantifiable.**==
Love how she calls out that Slack is probably just measuring, "are people using it?" (quantifiable) not "are people productive?" (not quantifiable). This is often a problem with rewarding the wrong metrics.