It seems to be trendy to blame Slack for all the ills of modern civilization. Is it the somewhat smug tone of all Slack's corporate communication? Maybe. Other than that, it seems to me to be more or less the same general bucket of telegrams, telephone calls, pages, texts, emails, etc. that each preceding generation has blamed on their inability to focus. If you can't resist distractions, whether it's Slack, or watching the ducks in the pond through the window, yes, you should close the blinds. I don't know why this rated a post on Medium...
Exactly, well said. As humans we’re excellent at blaming pretty much anything else (Slack, email, telephone, telegram, anything really) for what is our own and only our own inability to focus.
I agree. Still our issue and our issue alone as individuals. Nobody’s forcing anybody to use something designed to steal their attention. And if someone is being forced to in a work environment, that sounds to me like a cultural issue, not an issue with the attention stealing tool itself.
All humans are effected by these distractions of modern communications. We all check them too often and notifications break everyone's focus. Our brains are built like this. When something happens suddenly, we focus on that. May be because of evolution. So, how is this our own individual problem?
Ah, I agree with you. I simply meant it’s our individual problem in that it’s not the devices causing it, it’s our ability to be distracted in the first place. Collectively, we share the same problem as humans. Poor wording on my part.
In a world of lottery tickets and gamification it's pretty easy to imagine software crafted to steal attention from us.
Slack is synchronous, it's built around notifications and always on-ness (though their default do not disturb settings were a great improvement). It's also become a bit mandatory.
Many email dominated businesses moved to slack. That's an actual qualitative increase in synchronous communications. At least email could be paced.
Things totally get rediscovered all the time, but if everyone is saying the same thing at the same time, it does feel like something's off...
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It seems to be trendy to blame Slack for all the ills of modern civilization. Is it the somewhat smug tone of all Slack's corporate communication? Maybe. Other than that, it seems to me to be more or less the same general bucket of telegrams, telephone calls, pages, texts, emails, etc. that each preceding generation has blamed on their inability to focus. If you can't resist distractions, whether it's Slack, or watching the ducks in the pond through the window, yes, you should close the blinds. I don't know why this rated a post on Medium...
Exactly, well said. As humans we’re excellent at blaming pretty much anything else (Slack, email, telephone, telegram, anything really) for what is our own and only our own inability to focus.
All of these devices are built specifically to steal your focus with buzzers and flashing lights. If anything it's an arms race.
I agree. Still our issue and our issue alone as individuals. Nobody’s forcing anybody to use something designed to steal their attention. And if someone is being forced to in a work environment, that sounds to me like a cultural issue, not an issue with the attention stealing tool itself.
All humans are effected by these distractions of modern communications. We all check them too often and notifications break everyone's focus. Our brains are built like this. When something happens suddenly, we focus on that. May be because of evolution. So, how is this our own individual problem?
Ah, I agree with you. I simply meant it’s our individual problem in that it’s not the devices causing it, it’s our ability to be distracted in the first place. Collectively, we share the same problem as humans. Poor wording on my part.
In a world of lottery tickets and gamification it's pretty easy to imagine software crafted to steal attention from us.
Slack is synchronous, it's built around notifications and always on-ness (though their default do not disturb settings were a great improvement). It's also become a bit mandatory.
Many email dominated businesses moved to slack. That's an actual qualitative increase in synchronous communications. At least email could be paced.
Things totally get rediscovered all the time, but if everyone is saying the same thing at the same time, it does feel like something's off...