It was impossible to refer back to a decision that had been made, or to neatly preserve the information so that others could find it later. Ideas were proposed, discussed for a bit, and lost. With multiple, simultaneous conversations happening inside a single Slack channel, we began losing track of things. Which brings us to the next point… It was disorganized This meant that our conversations were fractured into multiple pieces that were hard to put together.Ĭommunication was shallow and chaotic. We still needed separate tools-in our case email and Wedoist-to have deeper conversations about our work. With Slack, there was no breathing room to take a step back, think about what was being discussed, and follow up on it later. We had a similar experience as Dave Teare, founder of Agile Bits:īefore you could even fully understand the problem being discussed (let alone find a solution), someone would invariably start a new conversation or reply to a previous discussion that happened earlier in the channel.Įven when conversations stayed on topic, everything still required an immediate response. Group chat interfaces are designed for rapid fire messaging, and it was nearly impossible to sustain a full conversation from start to finish. Slack was useful for quickly checking on things, but we found that it was a troublesome channel for big picture discussions. It wasn’t healthy for our team, and it wasn’t helping us focus on the hard work that really moves projects forward. One study found that Slack users spend an of average of ten hours per day in the app! That’s not to say that people aren’t multitasking of course, but study after study has shown that constant context-switching -like when you stop what you’re doing to check on a notification from a teammate- kills productivity and leads to “ more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort.” The more conversations, the more everyone’s expected to participate. I’m finding that “always on” tendency to be a self-perpetuating feedback loop: the more everyone’s hanging out, the more conversations take place. How do you stay in the loop when earlier topics have already been discussed and are buried by the time you even wake up?Īs Samuel Hulick put it in his famous “break-up” letter to the app: This style of communication was especially problematic for a remote-first company like ours, with team members spread across many different time zones. If you weren’t following conversations as they unfolded inside Slack, you were likely missing out on important discussions and decisions. One of the first things Slack does during onboarding is ask to send you notifications.īecause conversations in Slack happen on a one-way conveyor belt, our team began feeling like they had to stay constantly connected to keep up. in emergency situations), but presents significant downsides when it becomes your team’s primary way of communicating. This form of communication is sometimes useful (e.g. Group chat apps like Slack are built for a specific kind of communication - one-line-at-a-time, real-time conversations. Something for teams like ours with the audacity to think that maybe there’s more to work than keeping up with group chat… The problem with real-time most of the time It’s also the story of how we had the (possibly) crazy idea that we could contribute something fundamentally different to an already cluttered team communication market. This post is the story of why we stopped using Slack. Almost overnight, we went from a group of 30 individuals to a true team.Īnd then, two years in, we quit Slack cold turkey. We celebrated successes and discussed ways to improve our work. ( Lots of gifs.) We reported bugs and developed inside jokes. ![]() Communication between team members across continents exploded. To say the app was a game-changer would be putting it mildly. But our steadily growing team based across several time zones made it hard to stay on the same page and even harder to feel like one, cohesive team. Until then, we had relied on a mix of email and an internal tool called Wedoist for all of our communication. Three years ago our remote company joined Slack.
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