Our office recently started using Slack. It’s the fastest growing workplace software ever and Inc.’s 2015 company of the year, amassing 1.7 million users in just 20 months after its launch.
Slack is essentially a chat application with iOS, Android, and browser-based versions available. PC Magazine calls it a great tool for nonessential communication and private backchannel discussion.
Nonessential communication?
By the sounds of it small-ish teams may benefit the most from using Slack as a direct messaging app, like Skype or MSN Messenger before it, offsetting rampant email use which can hamper productivity. Larger groups and online communities on the other hand may struggle with Slack’s lack of more advanced project management capabilities.
A colleague affectionately touted Slack as an email alternative, going so far as to call it an “email killer”, bolstering the argument that email has gotten so bad of late — a conduit for spam, fraudulent and unsolicited communications — that it needs to be killed or used less in the workplace in favor of direct message apps like Slack that encourage quick and informal communication. It might be tempting to ‘Slack’ a colleague rather than walk over to their desk and you could say ‘Slacking’ (and emailing) a colleague have both become a crutch for traditional face-to-face conversations, which often require more effort. But given the rise of hybrid workplaces comprised of teams working remotely who may not always be in the same physical space, tools like Slack become rather useful and necessary for collaboration among teams.
Email can suck the productivity out of the best of us if you find yourself sifting through swaths of CC’d messages, newsletters and meeting requests. Is it really much different in Slack, scanning though reams of discussion threads and company #channels that might be updated on a daily or hourly basis? And popular email apps like MS Outlook and Gmail already offer workplace conversation mode features, so is it really necessary to use a separate app like Slack?
Skepticism aside, I was still interested to see what all the fuss was about given my experience with Basecamp and JIRA for project collaboration in the past. But as I quickly discovered after just a couple weeks, Slack is full of quirky and often frustrating conventions that don’t seem to make much sense on the surface. Take for instance Slack’s insistence that channel names contain no special characters (e.g. !@#$%&>.) and be 21 characters or less. You can’t, for example, type the full name of a project or the client’s URL (our team work on numerous web sites for various media properties), so you’re invariably you’re stuck with a lot of vaguely titled channels to sort through. This is strange so I asked @SlackHQ why and they said it was for “aesthetic reasons”, which is funny because channels are actually sandwiched into a ridiculously narrow column on the left-hand side of the screen while discussion threads extend off indefinitely. The desktop UI suffers from a bad case of interface sprawl ↓.
To quote Maciej Cegłowski, “I’m an adult human being sitting at a large display, with a mouse and keyboard. I deserve better.”
Productivity-Thwarting Email Notifications
The way Slack handles notifications is also a bit bewildering, granted I’m a new user unfamiliar with the Slack way of doing things. Emails land in my in-box throughout the day: “Something happened on Slack while you were away…click this link…” oh fantastic. How do I turn off these annoying alerts! Isn’t Slack supposed to help me cut-down on the number of emails I get? Perhaps I should have watched the training videos. But who has time to watch software training videos?
A colleague posts a direct message to me on Slack, but as luck would have it I’m not logged-in to the application, which means I receive yet another email. Again, isn’t Slack supposed to help me cut down on email use? These notifications are conspiring to erode my attention. The more I use Slack the more I wish it could be similar in some ways to Basecamp or even JIRA, which isn’t saying much —more flexibility and user-friendliness without the ridiculous emphasis on emoji reactions.