Remote work does not imply async work.
Using Slack does not imply async work.
And Slack does not imply Slack.
JIRA, Trello, Confluence, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Clockwise, Loom, <Insert Your Org Tools> are all in Slack now.
For the great majority of these tools, you don’t ever need to open them if the things you’re interested in are updates. I do this to the point that I rarely check my email anymore. Every update that is relevant to my daily, mid and long term work has been fed into Slack - the central notification hub that it is - for years now.
All these tools have their own product and business critical metrics on retention and engagement that can sometimes be at odds with one just wanting to Get Things Done. This is because some of these tools will fundamentally equate time spent on a tool to value given by a tool, as opposed to tools that take the simplest and fastest path to value and just get out of your way.
Even if all these tools would respect your time, given the amount of tools a typical organization uses and how prevalent the core ones are across the organization, the sum of all the FOMOs from all of the tools is a very hard battle to fight were they to be concentrated in a single place.
For me, Slack has become that place.
I can’t tell you how many times this past year I’ve just found myself just waiting on the next notification. The reactive mode of operating wins the vast majority of times - and this goes for outside of work too.
So, how does one work in the attention-economy era?
I don’t presume to be smart enough to answer this. This endless notification chasing is fully synchronous work - I no longer try to pretend otherwise. I was fortunate enough to join an organization back in 2016 that was extremely self aware of this from the beginning.
Yet here I am 7 years later repeating that which was already told to me multiple times over the years. Depending on the subject, some things are just learned by (the good kind of) pain. And I can only expect the pain to get worse, with all the attention-economy era SaaS tooling thriving over the next decade.
So I’ve set myself an anti-goal for 2023: I’m not going to chase notifications on Slack anymore.
I’ve started to measure and optimize the time spent consuming and responding to updates. I will define specific time windows and SLOs for Slack and will be transparent about those to people interacting with me.
Using Slack does not imply async work.
And Slack does not imply Slack.
JIRA, Trello, Confluence, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Clockwise, Loom, <Insert Your Org Tools> are all in Slack now.
For the great majority of these tools, you don’t ever need to open them if the things you’re interested in are updates. I do this to the point that I rarely check my email anymore. Every update that is relevant to my daily, mid and long term work has been fed into Slack - the central notification hub that it is - for years now.
All these tools have their own product and business critical metrics on retention and engagement that can sometimes be at odds with one just wanting to Get Things Done. This is because some of these tools will fundamentally equate time spent on a tool to value given by a tool, as opposed to tools that take the simplest and fastest path to value and just get out of your way.
Even if all these tools would respect your time, given the amount of tools a typical organization uses and how prevalent the core ones are across the organization, the sum of all the FOMOs from all of the tools is a very hard battle to fight were they to be concentrated in a single place.
For me, Slack has become that place.
I can’t tell you how many times this past year I’ve just found myself just waiting on the next notification. The reactive mode of operating wins the vast majority of times - and this goes for outside of work too.
So, how does one work in the attention-economy era?
I don’t presume to be smart enough to answer this. This endless notification chasing is fully synchronous work - I no longer try to pretend otherwise. I was fortunate enough to join an organization back in 2016 that was extremely self aware of this from the beginning.
Yet here I am 7 years later repeating that which was already told to me multiple times over the years. Depending on the subject, some things are just learned by (the good kind of) pain. And I can only expect the pain to get worse, with all the attention-economy era SaaS tooling thriving over the next decade.
So I’ve set myself an anti-goal for 2023: I’m not going to chase notifications on Slack anymore.
I’ve started to measure and optimize the time spent consuming and responding to updates. I will define specific time windows and SLOs for Slack and will be transparent about those to people interacting with me.