I’m not really big on email, either. I obviously have an account, but I don’t converse via email with anyone through it if I can help it.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work at a startup that embraces other channels rather than email. So even there, I’ve been able to successfully avoid it. I should probably change my settings so it checks less often, though. I get enough spam that I’m interrupted a few times a day with nonsense.
Not that I’m anywhere near the same level as Don :P
I think it really comes down to how you view (or expect to view/use?) each particular channel.
Recently I have gotten my team on Slack, after failed attempts at Hipchat, Google Hangouts and others. In my case, what I like about Slack (and the other tools which failed to take hold) is that now I can safely assume that email is an exclusively external channel. Not that it’s an unimportant one, mind you, but that it either includes someone outside of the company or that the acceptable timeline of my response is on the order of magnitude of hours, rather than minutes.
I tend to leave every-other day with my inbox at 0 unread emails. However, if at any given hour while I’m busy coding I have 15 unreads, I can safely choose to completely not give a shit. I know that anything urgent would come via Slack DM. It’s a great feeling to not have to worry about checking email every-so-often. I can just sort of get around to it “whenever” because in the mean time I’m getting work done.
If you can’t make that assumption/categorization, I can see Slack being yet-another-annoyance in your life.
Worth noting that our Slack does tend to be “strictly business” on the whole. A lot of it functions via direct messages, and I don’t have to worry about wading through pages of banter to find the substance of what someone was trying to say to me. I have seen friends' companies whose team-centric Slack channels were cluttered with as many gifs as information, and I can see that being infuriating.
Additionally, if there is one person who uses Slack less effectively (promptly?) than the rest of us, it is our CEO. He literally lives in his GMail Inbox, armed to the gills with a dozen browser plugins specific to GMail. And logically so, because a lot of what he does involves interfacing with external actors. So while he does still use Slack for internal communication, he naturally has to care equally about the outside world.
It could be because I’ve worked in smallish groups, but when I’ve worked non-remote jobs, I’ve already mostly assumed that about email without having something like Slack. If someone really needed something in a time-critical way, they’d just walk over and tell me in person. So I could assume anything that came purely over email wasn’t that latency sensitive. Do you prefer Slack to that? I could see it maybe being more unobtrusive, but not entirely sure; bugging someone in person is definitely an interruption, but also has more friction to it than DMing people on Slack seems to, so people don’t overuse it as much.
Our team is about half remote, and so behavior protocols trend toward those which work universally. By that I mean: Slack-DM-as-interrupt-request works for both remote and physically present persons.
I am with the half of the company that is all in one place, however, so some face-to-face “Hey, about this thing…” still does occur. But just as often it happens that the person next to me will drop it in a Slack DM as a sort of “When you can spare a moment, answer question/look at this” request, rather than turning to me and performing a hard interrupt.
Edit: I will add that I am (somewhat) senior to the other technical team members, and am also a really social person. I have had to learn that my semi-seniority combined with gift of gab meant I would overlook how annoying my “Hey, about this thing…” could actually be. So I started using Slack for that to be less of a distraction, and everyone else followed suit.
My team (and the whole engineering portion of the company) uses IRC (it’s like Slack, but less fancy) for most quick communication
I love IRC for this purpose. And IMO it offers a real benefit over Slack by not providing persistence.
With Slack when I check in for the morning or after disconnecting to do work, I’m immediately bombarded with ephemeral messages that are beyond stale. Or, worse, I get a ping because someone messaged @channel.
But because it allows persistency its alluringly easy for your team to slowly start treating it as a place to use non-ephemeral communication. And then you must go page through fifty Jenkins messages and cat memes to find the useful discussion. That’s terrible.
(And yeah, you could use an IRC bouncer to get around that, but that’s an optional thing only - not enforced in the way Slack does)
We use Slack for day to day conversations/IMs, but we are a small, disciplined org where there isn’t much noise. We also use zoom for video when necessary.
I’m one of those email fans. But I like letters too. My opinion is that it facilitates better discussions. I have found that people talking over chat services often don’t have the time or take the time to really articulate what they want, and I think email serves that better. Like in real life, I think a loud chatter can own a channel of communication much more than in email. But, YMMV, of course.
I like how he doesn’t use it, but still has an opinion on how it should be spelled. :)
(And yes, that was the hot topic in lexicography when this was written.)
I’m not really big on email, either. I obviously have an account, but I don’t converse via email with anyone through it if I can help it.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work at a startup that embraces other channels rather than email. So even there, I’ve been able to successfully avoid it. I should probably change my settings so it checks less often, though. I get enough spam that I’m interrupted a few times a day with nonsense.
Not that I’m anywhere near the same level as Don :P
What are those, out of curiosity?
I used to detest email. But after living with Slack for the past few jobs, email strikes me as the least painful option by far.
I think it really comes down to how you view (or expect to view/use?) each particular channel.
Recently I have gotten my team on Slack, after failed attempts at Hipchat, Google Hangouts and others. In my case, what I like about Slack (and the other tools which failed to take hold) is that now I can safely assume that email is an exclusively external channel. Not that it’s an unimportant one, mind you, but that it either includes someone outside of the company or that the acceptable timeline of my response is on the order of magnitude of hours, rather than minutes.
I tend to leave every-other day with my inbox at 0 unread emails. However, if at any given hour while I’m busy coding I have 15 unreads, I can safely choose to completely not give a shit. I know that anything urgent would come via Slack DM. It’s a great feeling to not have to worry about checking email every-so-often. I can just sort of get around to it “whenever” because in the mean time I’m getting work done.
If you can’t make that assumption/categorization, I can see Slack being yet-another-annoyance in your life.
Worth noting that our Slack does tend to be “strictly business” on the whole. A lot of it functions via direct messages, and I don’t have to worry about wading through pages of banter to find the substance of what someone was trying to say to me. I have seen friends' companies whose team-centric Slack channels were cluttered with as many gifs as information, and I can see that being infuriating.
Additionally, if there is one person who uses Slack less effectively (promptly?) than the rest of us, it is our CEO. He literally lives in his GMail Inbox, armed to the gills with a dozen browser plugins specific to GMail. And logically so, because a lot of what he does involves interfacing with external actors. So while he does still use Slack for internal communication, he naturally has to care equally about the outside world.
It could be because I’ve worked in smallish groups, but when I’ve worked non-remote jobs, I’ve already mostly assumed that about email without having something like Slack. If someone really needed something in a time-critical way, they’d just walk over and tell me in person. So I could assume anything that came purely over email wasn’t that latency sensitive. Do you prefer Slack to that? I could see it maybe being more unobtrusive, but not entirely sure; bugging someone in person is definitely an interruption, but also has more friction to it than DMing people on Slack seems to, so people don’t overuse it as much.
Our team is about half remote, and so behavior protocols trend toward those which work universally. By that I mean: Slack-DM-as-interrupt-request works for both remote and physically present persons.
I am with the half of the company that is all in one place, however, so some face-to-face “Hey, about this thing…” still does occur. But just as often it happens that the person next to me will drop it in a Slack DM as a sort of “When you can spare a moment, answer question/look at this” request, rather than turning to me and performing a hard interrupt.
Edit: I will add that I am (somewhat) senior to the other technical team members, and am also a really social person. I have had to learn that my semi-seniority combined with gift of gab meant I would overlook how annoying my “Hey, about this thing…” could actually be. So I started using Slack for that to be less of a distraction, and everyone else followed suit.
[Comment removed by author]
I love IRC for this purpose. And IMO it offers a real benefit over Slack by not providing persistence.
With Slack when I check in for the morning or after disconnecting to do work, I’m immediately bombarded with ephemeral messages that are beyond stale. Or, worse, I get a ping because someone messaged @channel.
But because it allows persistency its alluringly easy for your team to slowly start treating it as a place to use non-ephemeral communication. And then you must go page through fifty Jenkins messages and cat memes to find the useful discussion. That’s terrible.
(And yeah, you could use an IRC bouncer to get around that, but that’s an optional thing only - not enforced in the way Slack does)
We use Slack for day to day conversations/IMs, but we are a small, disciplined org where there isn’t much noise. We also use zoom for video when necessary.
I’m one of those email fans. But I like letters too. My opinion is that it facilitates better discussions. I have found that people talking over chat services often don’t have the time or take the time to really articulate what they want, and I think email serves that better. Like in real life, I think a loud chatter can own a channel of communication much more than in email. But, YMMV, of course.