nyssa

I hate Slack

November 28, 2020
, 11:10 pm
, Opinion
No Responses

Yes, this is not the popular cool kid position, but I just don’t get the love affair with the tool (or tools like it, looking at you: Whats App!). I get the desire to just spew out a thought to a group or to someone specific in a DM and Slack makes that trivial todo, but it inevitably turns into a dumpster roll of disjointed conversations.

And look, I get that Slack has tremendous ease of use, awesome integrations, and ability to store history of conversations, but for me the cons list makes it a non-efficient tool for any high achieving person:

pros	cons
quick ease of use to ping someone and have a quick chat it has tons of integrations which makes it super sticky	its the very definition of interruption unless you are paying for slack – you lose your history of conversation unstructured data! so many gems are left in slack conversations and not tied to a task in a project management or knowledge management tool it is always on – and like social media feeds, you are always jonesing for what you missed you are always feel behind in the conversations – because of the sheer volume of chatter, you tend to feel like you are left behind (unless you are spending your day in the tool!) what channel should you post things to? a channel taxonomy will never be obvious to anyone but the creator – so now you have policies on what to post where and again, dumpster roll

pros

cons

quick ease of use to ping someone and have a quick chat
it has tons of integrations which makes it super sticky

its the very definition of interruption
unless you are paying for slack – you lose your history of conversation
unstructured data! so many gems are left in slack conversations and not tied to a task in a project management or knowledge management tool
it is always on – and like social media feeds, you are always jonesing for what you missed
you are always feel behind in the conversations – because of the sheer volume of chatter, you tend to feel like you are left behind (unless you are spending your day in the tool!)
what channel should you post things to? a channel taxonomy will never be obvious to anyone but the creator – so now you have policies on what to post where and again, dumpster roll

A company tool allowing people to essentially text each other for some quick comment or to notify of something happening, is for sure needed, and back in the day Microsoft Messenger played this role well.

But the way Slack is being used today in the enterprise, I think is just a recipe for a literal ton of unstructured data to be lost in the ether to never have true use and purpose – gems lost forever.

Here is how I think Slack should be used:

Notifications – if you want to broadcast some success to a group – Slack slays – broadcasting these notifications allows people in the channel to add their thoughts and opinions that could help progress the item to the next step in the journey
1. so for instance every time you make a sale – you can broadcast that to a channel and celebrate the win
2. every time you have a new prospective lead in the door – this is a great celebration point and allows the channel users to augment the lead data with any data points they have (i.e. they
Quick DM Chats – Like text messaging, Slack is great to just ping someone to take note of something, or to simply answer a question. If you are in the office this is the get up and chat real quick – but now in our remote working world, Slack is perfect for this