Slack is not hard to ignore. As I've mentioned in previous threads:
* Mute all channels.
* Take long periods of time to respond to people. Trust me, this isn't ever going to lead to any sense of shame.
* Set yourself to away most of the time.
* Disable gifs.
* Set notifications for keywords like "lunch" and "meeting".
* Disable the icon badge. (the red dot if you're using macOS)
Now you can be productive with Slack.
I know all these things are designed to grab our attention but, seriously, have some agency in your life. Deciding to go "offline" is perfectly legitimate, but I do think Slack can be easily used in a way that doesn't waste time.
The reasons a lot of people complain about are the same reasons I like slack. First, if i'm intensely busy, I just ignore it. It stays backgrounded, and a little blue or red dot sits there. That's it. When i'm in a general workday, i'll usually try to check red dots, and relegate the others to 'as time allows.' But that's its draw to me. I love seeing the goofy gifs, custom emojis, etc that people come up with. It's a sort of comic relief from the stressful days. In the end, it sounds like a lot of folks just have trouble with self control, so blame a tool. You don't have to click the red/blue dot...just let it be.
This is exactly right but it just shows how terrible the default Slack configuration is. It's probably somewhat broken by design. Being noisy and distracting surely increases Slack's usage numbers.
Comments
Slack is not hard to ignore. As I've mentioned in previous threads:
* Mute all channels.
* Take long periods of time to respond to people. Trust me, this isn't ever going to lead to any sense of shame.
* Set yourself to away most of the time.
* Disable gifs.
* Set notifications for keywords like "lunch" and "meeting".
* Disable the icon badge. (the red dot if you're using macOS)
Now you can be productive with Slack.
I know all these things are designed to grab our attention but, seriously, have some agency in your life. Deciding to go "offline" is perfectly legitimate, but I do think Slack can be easily used in a way that doesn't waste time.
The reasons a lot of people complain about are the same reasons I like slack. First, if i'm intensely busy, I just ignore it. It stays backgrounded, and a little blue or red dot sits there. That's it. When i'm in a general workday, i'll usually try to check red dots, and relegate the others to 'as time allows.' But that's its draw to me. I love seeing the goofy gifs, custom emojis, etc that people come up with. It's a sort of comic relief from the stressful days. In the end, it sounds like a lot of folks just have trouble with self control, so blame a tool. You don't have to click the red/blue dot...just let it be.
This is exactly right but it just shows how terrible the default Slack configuration is. It's probably somewhat broken by design. Being noisy and distracting surely increases Slack's usage numbers.