[bluehatbrit]

In previous teams I've worked hard to make sure slack isn't the place for decisions to be made that are any greater than where to go for lunch. Same with bigger questions as well.

Slack is great for small insignificant chatter but developers need long uninterrupted periods of quiet to work. That doesn't go well with an IM system that people expect to get big questions answered or key decisions made with.

If the team needs to discuss a key decision everyone should be given time to digest the information at hand and respond. That might be in a synchronous meeting or over an asynchronous email but either way people need to have time to think and contribute. Slack prioritises whoever is first to reply and no one wants to read a 50+ message thread to figure out if they have relevant input.

If someone external to my team wants to ask a question thats of any significance I'll try to jump in and set their expectations. If it requires input from multiple people on my team then it's best done over something slower like email / collaborative docs, or as a last resort a meeting. If it's internal to the team I'll try and push it out to a mechanism that allows people to set time aside to consider the topic and respond.

Most questions in and around the team are small and less opinion based. How does X work? How do I do Y? When did Z change? Anything like that is usually fine to be answered by anyone when they get a moment and doesn't require much input from the whole team, Slack is totally fine. To help out I like using the slack action thing for when someone joins a teams channel to let them know that it could take a bit to get an answer because the team may be focused on something else.

As you say, emergencies are different. Those are raised via alerting of some sort and interrupt people in a different method.

[don-code]

> Slack prioritises whoever is first to reply and no one wants to read a 50+ message thread to figure out if they have relevant input.

My personal belief is that Slack provides a perverse incentive to reply quickly, rather than thoughtfully. There's a time and place for quick communications, but the majority of discussions I have over Slack feel that they'd be better served by thoughtful requests with equally (if not more) thoughtful responses.

E-mail was great at this: the extra overhead (if it could be called that, but I digress) of writing an e-mail encouraged information density in that e-mail - I want to convey my point in the least number of round trips possible, and likewise, have my question answered in the least number of round trips possible. Slack does away with this; round trips so easy as to be common, and in fact we have sites like nohello.com showing that the trend towards round-trips isn't helpful.

[irrational]

It might incentivize it, but you don’t have to give in to the incentive. I turn off slack when I am heads down working. When I am using slack, I try to leave a few minutes in between my responses so the other person can add more if they wish as they are given more time to think. It also helps to train people to not expect an immediate response from me like they might get from text messaging.

[MuffinFlavored]

> Slack prioritises whoever is first to reply and no one wants to read a 50+ message thread to figure out if they have relevant input.

But they want to read a long e-mail thread?

[bluehatbrit]

Not nessesarily, but it tends to be slower moving and each element in the thread tends to be larger and better thought through. I find this means they tend to end up shorter as a result when you skip all the email signatures. There's also less sense of urgency to reply as well meaning you can set aside some time rather than feeling like you're missing out on the slack thread which may still be moving.

Other tools can work as well like shared documents if the content/context is several pages or something.

[shafyy]

I think Basecamp nails the compromise between email and Slack (I’m sure there are other tools similar to Basecamp that also do a good job)

[jesterson]

This is excellent writeup I could have made, but @bluehatbrit made it much better.

Slack is very distracting. I surprise some people saying I am pushing every meaningful convo out of slack and hopefully one day to completely scrap it and throw away.

Emails are way better since it pushes people to think the problem first, and you'll be surprised how many problems have found solution before "Send" button is pressed.

It's easier to just send something like "Hiyo Mark, hihi! Wazzup?". This is where it gets dangerous to performance and focus.

[bluehatbrit]

I think Slack has a place in communication but it has a really poor balance. It's so easy to create and send a message to a channel and tag a few people. As a result it moves quickly and makes it hard to digest and reply slowly. It's also extremely hard to find things again later, even with the improvements to search.

Back in the days of IRC a lot of people thought lack of history was a "missing feature" but now we have it with Slack I think it was probably the best feature of IRC. When the platform has no memory you're often pushed away from it for anything that's deeper. No one can come along later and find your messages so you know you can't put anything that requires wide visibility or input there.

I'm not going to shill for IRC and say everyone should go back to it or anything, it's not really practical. But that said, I do think Slack has a huge flaw in it's design of making it so easy to send messages and pretend everyone's going to see it.

[nlnn]

Any tips on making sure that Slack isn't the place for important decisions?

We're facing this problem at the moment, with Slack being heavily used for almost everything.

Main difficulty is changing culture around its use - there are plenty alternatives that we push people towards, but they tend to get ignored in favour of Slack since asking is easier there.

[bluehatbrit]

I think it really depends on your team and your position within the team. For me it was just a case of pointing out that people feel under pressure to respond and it's making it harder to focus. It was a genuine problem within the team that lots of people were feeling so it wasn't really news to anyone. Then it was just a case of being the one to start noticing topics that are larger and pushing them out of slack. "This feels like it might need some team wide input, Phil, can you do a summary in an email and send it around?" or something along those lines.

I suppose it's important to say don't be militant about it and allow discussions to happen a bit to really see if they're shallow or deep topics. Shallow topics are fine for slack because you probably only need a couple people's input. Deep topics where you specifically want the whole team are the ones you want to pull into something slower moving.

Trying to change habbit is tricky so it's a case of slow errosion of the old habbit with the new one. Eventually the team started to make those kind of calls themselves, and newer team members picked it up quickly as well.

[pseudalopex]

Limit message retention.

[taeric]

I don't fully disagree, but I do disagree that I want all decisions done in a long format. Especially when I'm specifically trying to get my team to be way more agile and willing to make decisions while they are working.

Throwing up a quick discussion point on a slack room while you are acting on the idea is perfectly fine. Just as it could be perfectly fine to toss the code if the idea doesn't pan out.

[fendy3002]

My current supervisor do it right, a big decision is stared in slack. It usually attracts 3-6 people in that discussion. A huddle or teams meeting is arranged if needed.

Then another slack discussion is posted with a v1 proposal in it, and link to previous discussion. This time, more people can give dissenting opinion. If nothing conflicting, a short sharing session will be held presenting this, and see whether there's dissenting opinion again.

[bluehatbrit]

That's fair enough! I don't think it's about completely eliminating all decisions from happening in slack. It's just the one's OP was talking about where they would benefit from the whole team having the opportunity to consider the topic and give their input. Smaller decisions which only require the input of a few members of the team and shallow conversation I think are fine to be had in slack, that's where slack works really well.

I think a bit of it boils down to each team being different as well, if you need a team to be more agile then using slack more might be the right thing. In OP's case they sound like they need their team to slow down and consider some things more deeply and slowly. In that case pushing those topics out of slack may make sense.