How Slack Killed My Productivity

And how you can take back yours

tl;dr:

1. Promote Slack etiquette as part of your corporate culture and onboarding process

2. Create channels for specific domains/modules/teams and separate development and production channels.

3. Force people using @channel to confirm before sending the message

4. Limit who can use slack @mentions in your public Slack channels

5. In the meanwhile, minimize your “Slack attack vector”

I love Slack. We all do. That’s why it’s valuated at around $7B (!) right now. It’s a great tool for communicating within and between teams. It pretty much completely replaced email for me. It has done to emails what Whatsapp did for sms: about 90% of the emails I get now are basically spam.

But it has completely ruined my productivity, and my ability to manage my own time.

Don’t get me wrong. Slack does appear to have productivity in mind. It integrates with virtually anything, supports building custom bots, and uses @mentions as a great way to selectively ping the people you need, unintrusively.

As a matter of fact, the @mentions is one of the things that are really missing for me on other messaging apps, like Whatsapp. There’s nothing more annoying than having Whatsapp groups constantly pop up as notifications everytime someone writes anything on a group. On Slack, you won’t get notified of anything in a channel (or group) unless someone mentions you specifically (of course you can tweak that in the settings, but other than adding an alert for when someone writes “chocolates in the kitchen” why would you). That’s a great way for managing who exactly needs to be weighed in on a conversation currently being held inside a multi-participant channel without having to intrude on everyone.

Introducing “@here” & “@channel”

The most powerful mentions on Slack are: @here & @channel. They basically notify everyone in the channel. But there’s a big difference between the two, a difference that most people don’t make. You can read more about the two here. In a nutshell:

• @here notifies people who are currently online and active
• @channel notifies everybody in the channel.

Basically, @here would only notify people currently active in the Slack app, while @channel notifies everyone, whether they’re offline, sleeping, on vacation etc. If you have the Slack app installed on your phone, you’ll get a notification. With @here, if you’re not active in the app, you won’t.

The proliferation of “@channel”

At my workplace, people found out about @channel and pretty much started using it for everything:

• Someone’s taking down some DB you’re not even using? on a Sunday?
• Someone has a “lesson learned” to share?
• A new version is being branched-out in our legacy repo?
• Someone has a birthday?
• There’s cake in the kitchen? (ok, that one’s crucial)

Everything will be sent with @channel. You should really know about this. Now.

Around 90% of all messages on our wide R&D or office channels are being sent with the @channel mention.

The boy who cried “@channel wolf!”

This is pretty much the tragedy of the @channel mention: it’s really only effective if used wisely, and with good measure. Once it becomes ubiquitous, it becomes a nuisance. Worst case scenario: people keep getting notified over stuff they don’t need to know right now and experience constant context-switching. This takes its toll on people’s ability to make the most of their time. It’s a real shame, because the @mention system is one of Slack’s most powerful features (together with the ability to react to a message with a Ron Swanson emoji. Get with the program, Whatsapp!).

If a message has no `@mention`, was it ever really sent?

When most people use @mentions all the time, everyone has to use them. It promotes an office culture in which you know you’ll get notified of everything, so you don’t have to actively look at channels. This way, if a message isn’t sent with a @mention no one really reads it. People feel if they simply write their message, without any @mention, then no one will ever know.

So how can we control this mess?

Talk about it

Start by trying and making this a part of your work environment etiquette. Have the conversation. Understand the difference between @mentions , why you should try and avoid the @channel mention like the plague, and even why sometimes (or most of the times, believe it or not) you don’t really need to use any mention at all.

If you’re working on something that might break something, try a “pull” approach, rather than a “push” approach: instead of notifying everyone in the appropriate channel (which still might have a lot of people, most uninterested), just write the message. Don’t mention anyone. If something breaks for someone, he can go into the channel and check to see if anyone wrote something valuable. You’ll be wasting less time for fewer people. This translates to more productivity, more working hours, less money wasted.

Slack etiquette should be part of any onboarding process for new employees joining the Slack team.

Separate development and production channels

Of course production issues require immediate attention and intervention, but you can try and limit the exposure of people to production issues by separating channels into development and production channels (and separate those into your company’s modules, domains or teams working on those production systems). If there are any production issues that require immediate attention and alert, you’d know you’re really notifying the people who can actually do something about it. Only production channels should have @channels mentions in them.

Alert anyone who uses “@channel”

Slack has the ability to alert anyone sending a message with a @channel mention in a channel with more than 6 people. It will ask the person to confirm sending the message. This can be very helpful in alerting people that they’re about to send a very intrusive message, and might reduce the amount of people who are simply using this out of lack of understanding. Just make sure this feature is enabled in your Slack space (workspace owners can control this, so contact your congressman)

Control who can use widespread “@mentions”

Workspace owners also control who can use these mentions. It might be a little excessive to restrict some people from completely using @channel, but then again, why should everyone even have the ability to notify everyone else in R&D about something? It might be a good idea to have only team-leads be able to use it, and act as some low-pass-filter for this. They might exercise better judgement, as they probably know better about how urgent something really is.

What you can do right now

Trying and making a change in your workplace is the long game. What can you do now to control your own time?

Start thinking of your time as a valuable asset that you should try and guard at all cost. Start thinking of this as a security issue. Here’s what I did to minimize the attack vector:

1. Turned off all notifications on my Slack. Both on my desktop and mobile app. This way, I control when I actively look for messages and updates. If someone needs me now, he knows where to find me (it helps to have a small office). If I need something, I actively look for it on Slack, or I go to that person and ask. I still keep the mobile app — for my own convenience. But I’ve switched off all notifications from it.
2. Muted almost every inessential channel.
3. Removed myself from any and all unnecessary, irrelevant or old Slack channels I was in.
4. I Periodically review all Slack channels I’m a member of. I hold them close to my chest, and ask myself: Does this channel spark joy in my heart?

my Slack status

Slack isn’t an Email replacement

Now yes, there’s a big downside to these steps, and it stems from Slack’s biggest problem: though it aims to replace the office email, and it has done so for me to some extent as I’ve mentioned, it really isn’t an actual email replacement. It’s a messaging app, and as a messaging app people regard it as a more immediate communication interface. If someone sends me an email, he doesn’t expect an immediate answer. If someone slacks me, he’ll probably start getting restless if I don’t answer within the first 10 minutes.

There’s no real solution for this. People will just have to either accept the fact that not everyone will be responsive immediately on Slack, or we can start making company-wide changes to promote more use of Slack as a productivity enhancer, and not a productivity killer.

In the meantime, hop off the grid for a while. You’ll have more time you can waste by being unproductive in different ways.

You’ll also miss all of the “cake in the kitchen” alerts. You can thank me later.