To Slack or Not To Slack
Messaging applications and their impact on productivity.
Last week at Inbox Awesome, we were provided a unique angle on the eternal debate around workplace productivity.
The Talk
The title of the panel was “Inbox Zero” and there were 3 panelists — Maggie Hsu, Oji Udezue, and Jerry Talton. Maggie tackled the problem of productivity in the workplace by coming up with a system that you can read here. The other two were from companies whose both advocate for improving on email, and then on killing email altogether.
Enter Oji Udezue, the Head of Product at Atlassian, the parent company of HipChat and Trello, among many other enterprise platforms. The company recently launched a Slack competitor, called Stride.
Stride vows to address a few of the major concerns with Slack, one being Slack encourages discussion but doesn’t lead to genuine discussion. Another major complaint is that Slack creates a culture of FOMO and distracts individuals from actually working.
Talk about perfect timing, after Oji’s rant, the next speaker was introduced. Their name? Jerry Talton, the Search, Learning & Intelligence Group Lead at Slack.
There were about 200 or so email marketers in the room, coming from different companies in different stages (ranging from startups to giant corporations like eBay). Jerry asked the question, “Who here uses Slack?” Everyone raised their hands up. No surprise there, with over 5 million users, and 1.5 million paying users, Slack is a universally adopted messaging platform.
He followed up and asked, “Who here thinks that Slack help increases productivity?”. No one raised their hands. No one. Maybe a couple of hands did shot up after Jared said “Oh, come on, really?”.
The Problem
Oji voiced the universal concern that the hardest part of many of our working days is ironically finding time to work. From the other side, Jerry identified one of the main problems at work is that people spend a lot of their time searching for the materials they need to get their work done.
Finding the time to work versus finding the right information to work, what is the real problem? John Dewey said that “A problem well put is half solved”. If the two companies tackling this problem can’t even agree on what the problem is, it becomes infinitely more interesting to see the solutions that define their competing approaches.
To Slack
What is Slack?
Slack is a phenomenon in the SaaS world, to date they have 6 million active users, and 2 million of them are paying customers. They are currently valued at $5 billion. At its core, Slack is a team-messaging application. What makes them so great, and what makes people fall in love at first sight, is it’s sleek design.
You look under the hood, and there are even more reasons to love Slack. Their integration with third-party applications are beyond powerful. You can connect to your Google Drive and drag and drop everything in the platform, granting access directly from the platform, among other things. You can integrate it with your emails, automatically populating your #email channel with incoming emails from your actual inbox. You can program the slackbot to remind you to do things by typing /remind me in <time> to <message>.
You can even program a bot to automatically Photoshop a person’s face into a picture. Any picture. Think of some other way you want to use Slack? There’s probably a way to do it. That’s its true power.
But there is also the downside. The purpose of Slack was supposed to be a messaging platform that allows you to be more productive, but instead because it’s so fun to be on Slack, some people forget why they are using Slack in the first place.
Samuel Hulick wrote a piece titled “Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You”, which outlined the love that he had for Slack and the consequent doom that followed. Brooke Torres wrote another piece called “Slack is killing your productivity. Here’s how to fix it,” which outlined the option you have to make on a daily basis when you’re on Slack: (1) Accept that you will never do focused work again in your life, except when your co-workers aren’t online. That means never — or (2) Boldly go where no one ever goes, and sign off Slack, and fear you are missing something important. Because you probably are.
This presents a very real dilemma of “To Slack or Not To Slack”.
Not To Slack
On the other end of the spectrum comes Stride.
Stride is a new team-messaging application that was created by Team Atlassian. It aims to tackle the productivity question with a different approach. Instead of a constant stream of messages, Stride aims to break things down into Actions & Decisions. This functionality will allow individuals to annotate any text as an action or a decision, allowing teams to collaboratively work together and quickly take actions and make decisions.
It also aims to solve the problem of FOMO, and create a new kind of culture of JOMO (or, the Joy of Missing Out). An individual can opt-in to Focus Mode, in which Stride will tell everyone else on your team that you are working on an important matter at hand. The premise here is, now people know not to not disturb you, and what is currently the most important thing on your plate right now.
In addition, the Atlassian team realized that people would not want to “opt-in to miss out” if there is the chance of missing something (curse you FOMO!). To solve this they created a catch-up mode which shows you the top 10 things you missed while you were away, as well as the stuff that you need to focus on next.
Right now Stride is still on Beta mode, and access to the application is granted by invitation only. It will be interesting to see if these design changes, and the way they approach team communication will have an impact in helping us all achieve productivity nirvana.
Other Alternatives
Of course these are not your only option. After all, you still have the old but gold Email as a means to communicate. Recently, Google has also revamped its Hangouts to make it more team-collaboration friendly. There are also Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook, Fuze, Azendoo — and many other applications that you can try to tackle this elephant in the room.
Last Words
At the end of the panel, Oji mentioned that your phone is telling you stuff all the time. His advice to us was, don’t let your phone run your life, phones are supposed to help you run yours. He also added that we should just do what we need to do, not more, so that we can spend time with the people that mean the most to us. Lastly, Jared’s advice to us was, it’s okay to leave somethings unread and focus on something that actually matters. After all, there’s too much information out there, you can’t possibly consume everything.
At the end of the day, it is important to know that it is not which SaaS product has the most superior functionality, but rather, which SaaS product fits into your personality and workflow to make you the most productive.
