Slack: Where Annoyance Happens

I remember the first time I started working remote and how amazing live chat was. No more annoying face to face conversations around your desk, but this totally new medium where introverts can have time to get into the conversation without being overpowered by all those talkers.

Jump forward a few years and the live chat medium has gone from awesome to annoyance. From the constant unread bubbles vying for your attention to the feel of having to always have it connected. Like a conjoined twin.

Luckily for me, at my full-time​ job we are given “slack free” hours throughout the day where we are expected to quit the app, and not check in for anything unless it’s an emergency and someone texts or calls. This is fantastic and is truly​ forward thinking because I’ve heard some dreadful horror stories about other companies.

I heard of one that has a special room that is just for status updates. The workers are expected to give updates every 15-minutes on what they are working on. It’s apparent some in the upper management would prefer a job at a preschool instead of running a software development company.

Other companies are a little better but I feel like the instant side of it has conditioned everyone to get that instant gratification and to forget other people are trying to get work done. Of course, I’m guilty of it too but I’m trying hard to change and move conversations to a different medium. I’m so tired of searching looking for a bug that I know we discussed only to find a conversation that happened over many days with a lot of other banter in between.

Have you found anything better? I’ve heard Basecamp is one answer to this problem but it still feels like “one more place” when most of us already have a half a dozen. Some days I wish we would all just go back to email.