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 |
|---|---|
|
|
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
- so for instance every time you make a sale – you can broadcast that to a channel and celebrate the win
- 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