Slack is a wonderful communication tool, I love how easy it is to get in touch with my co-workers, but it is also a huge time suck which I have become slightly addicted to. It is way to easy to start browsing through a channel, start checking on the pinned items (#living-vicariously, I’m looking at you), and then look up and realize that you have lost a hour of the prime working hours. When I first started my current position, I was so excited to have Slack. It was absolutely verboden at my previous workplace, and my one experience was using it at a hackathon just for about 24 hours. It was so shiny, and packed to the brim with emoji’s, gifs and fun times. Share your screen! Message! Share! For a while, I even had my laptop screen open with just Slack on that screen. You only have so much attention and concentration to spread around, and my brain power was getting sucked into Slack channels. I even had a couple weird Slack related dreams, and that is when you know you are spending waaaaaay to much time on it. It even felt a bit Circle to me at times, I related to a lot of parts of that book.
Now my getting down to business routine involves fully closing slack, muting other notifications, closing all unneeded chrome taps, and then putting in the headphones. How do you focus? Is Slack a time suck for others or is it just me. Might just be my fear of missing out (FOMO) coming into play here too ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Top comments (6)
I agree, my way of coping with "too much Slack" is to disable notifications, disable sounds and to not show the red badge in the icon. I also configured the sidebar to only show unreads and stars.
It takes me a couple of seconds more to go to a channel or to DM someone in an active situation. I also don't get interrupted with sounds or visual cues :D
It might be a tad extreme but you can play with the combinations and see what works for you!
You can also configure "channel specific notifications" so that some particular channels (like maybe the ones related to faling builds or something) can override the general settings.
Hope this helps
Disable slack notifications, open it right away only when I'm mentioned directly otherwise it can wait.
I don't use notifications for anything - not email, Jira, Slack, etc. Most of my personal chat happens in the terminal on a separate workspace so I have to remember to go there manually. I only do that when I'm finished whatever piece of work I'm working on or otherwise feel the need for a proper break.
Yeah, Slack's name is definitely fitting. Wonder if they knew...
I definitely have to keep the icon out of sight. Thankfully, the Windows system tray on the task bar helps with that.
Oh yeah, I've had a lot of issues with concentration and Slack. But once turn off notifications and set up some ground rules it's a really good tool.
too much stride for me. company switched from slack to stride.