Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15047334

by cdnsteve • 9 years ago

27 43 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We started using Slack a year+ ago when our team was smaller. Since then we've added other departments, groups and lots more users. The amount of noise and interruptions is becoming extremely distracting as a developer. I'm at the point of turning it off for 3/4 of the day. Check-in during the morning and near end of day then turn it off.

Is anyone else feeling like this? How do you keep the noise and distractions down? It seems like Slack is ideal for smaller groups but since we've brought more people in, added more channels, folks started doing group chats you're always "On-Call".

iLemming• 9 years ago

if you're on OSX you can install an app called Muzzle. it silences all notifications

rouzbeh842• 9 years ago

Or you can do this in the SysPref => Notifications tab

lolsal• 9 years ago

You can option-click the notifications menu to enable DND for the rest of the day.

ErikVandeWater• 9 years ago

Kill everyone who messages you.

Or just turn off notification sounds and popups. Your choice.

intermittently2• 9 years ago

I'm finding this more and more during my off hours. I wish there was a way to opt out of all @channel announcements on my phone app and still get notifications for when someone tags me directly (when I'm actually needed).

Probably not a helpful answer to your question, but I feel your pain, at any rate.

Banduin• 9 years ago

You can ignore @channel and @here on a per channel basic. It's under Notification Preferences in a channel. I think it applies to both desktop and phone though.

intermittently2• 9 years ago

I think it applies to both desktop and phone though.

Yeah, unfortunately that's the problem. It's probably worth doing what you suggest for multi-day vacations though (and un-doing when I'm back to my desk).

user59944613• 9 years ago

Did you install slack on your phone? Never install slack on your phone.

Uninstall slack from your phone. It's a matter of life or death and I am not even kidding.

closed• 9 years ago

Could you elaborate? I'm particularly interested in the matter of life or death bit :).

gm3• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, I'm coming to realize what you say is true. Now that I think about it, there is NO issue that negatively affects my work/life balance more than having Slack installed on my phone.

valuearb2• 9 years ago

If you strictly limit notifications it's okay. I'm fine with being notified of a critical bug or problem when I'm at home, and happy to grab my laptop to help. Even if sometimes it turns out to not be so critical or important.

But if you, unlike me, actually have hobbies or planned activities for your free time, deleting might be better.

MikeKusold• 9 years ago

Turn off notifications for channels that aren't relevant to you. I have 3 channels that I get notified on every message, the vast majority only if I get mentioned, and some that have notifications disabled.

Also chastise (professionally) people that abuse @channel for things that don't warrant interrupting everyone.

pesfandiar• 9 years ago

Turn off all notifications, and let everyone else know that Slack is not the way to reach you if there's an urgent need.

Unless, of course, it's your employer's policy to be promptly responsive on Slack, in which case I'd try to change that or consider other jobs if you're required to be constantly "on-call".

atmosx• 9 years ago

I find strange that they don't support "mute" for custom group of users, notifications or integrations.

For example, I need to receive notifications from channel #servers on my mobile, but I don't want to receive ALL notifications. I'd like to have the ability to include and exclude based on source (username, integration, etc.)

rouzbeh842• 9 years ago

They do channel specific but not the parameter specific you mention at the end there

t0mbstone3• 9 years ago

If you want advanced notifications that use regular expressions or whatever kind of rules you can dream up, you can always write a slack bot that listens to channels you are in and pings you directly whenever a rule matches. Any average software dev should be able to write a bot that does that, with less than a couple of hours worth of work. There are all sorts of existing bots that are open source and that can be easily modified and deployed. Slack's API is phenomenal.

traviswingo• 9 years ago

I have it set to only notify me on direct messages or mentions for all channels. It's significantly reduced the number of distractions on a daily basis.

twobyfour• 9 years ago

This. Also, I've muted all channels that I read to generally stay abreast of what's going on in the company but rarely to never need to actively participate in. And #random.

If you (or you and a group of allies) have the ability to influence your company's Slack culture, the following can help.

1) No one should ever @channel unless they absolutely positively need everybody's attention immediately that very moment. "The website is down! All hands on deck!" "There's a rabid raccoon loose in the office! Evacuate!" @here is slightly less awful but should still be used sparingly.

2) If you need someone's attention, @mention them. If you do require a group's attention, @here the appropriate channel. If you do this consistently, people can disable notifications for non-mentions and assume that any channel that has unreads but no mentions may be read at their leisure - instead of having to constantly keep up with dozens of conversations.

3) Use and teach people to use highlight words so they can get notifications of conversation topics that require their presence, and ignore other unread channels.

4) Set aside a channel or two for global or large-group announcements that aren't necessarily urgent. "We're ordering t-shirts. Tell the office manager what size you want." "Our phone system has a scheduled outage next Tuesday from 2-4pm."

5) The larger your organization and the busier your Slack, the more granular you need your channels to be. For instance, in a company of 5-10, you might have a single channel for all discussions of product, and another for sales, marketing, and partnerships. In a larger company you'll need to separate out channels for client vs server engineering; for engineering vs design; for engineering and design vs QA, and more. Don't make your designers try to filter out what content is relevant for them in a combined design and engineering channel or force your QA folks to ignore a whole bunch of technobabble in order to find the discussions that are relevant to them. Don't be afraid to break out project-specific channels too. If a conversation crosses boundaries, only then bring it to a more general channel.

brandur• 9 years ago

Your best bet might be to be less responsive on Slack — not only by not responding to everyone immediately, but by not responding to some Slack messages at all. If it's important, the person who pinged you can submit their request via another medium, hopefully in a longer form format like email or bug report that's more thoughtfully considered and thoroughly researched, and which you can reply/fix quickly without spending 10 to 30 minutes of your work day in tight synchronous communication.

It's sort of a bad thing to do, but you will start getting fewer Slack messages. People have an implicit understanding of who's likely to respond in a timely manner, and somewhat ironically, it's the most responsive people who have to improve their responsiveness even more because by being responsive they'll get even more messages and interruptions.

On a meta note, it continues to surprise me that more people and companies aren't talking about the highly distracting effects of the software. It works great at small scale, but if you get large enough everyone's pinging everyone all the time. I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport (excellent book by the way [1]) and couldn't help but being mildly entertained when they get into the time draining effects of email (it seems to have been written a little before Slack caught on). The distraction engine created by Slack is the SR-71's Pratt & Whitney J58 [2] compared to email's 5 HP motor out of an everyday golf cart.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58

rajathagasthya• 9 years ago

Deep Work is absolutely fantastic! I can already feel the difference in productivity just one week into practicing its strategies. I did three things to Slack after reading it:

1. Mute channels aggressively.

2. Snooze notifications often during the day.

3. Disable the red dot badge icon in the Slack app for any new messages (including the ones not addressed to you). This was the biggest source of distraction for me in Slack.

lostdog• 9 years ago

Disable the red dot badge icon in the Slack app for any new messages

How did you do this, and is there a way to disable the blue dot?

gm3• 9 years ago

I defintiely feel it. On my computer, I can just quit the Slack app and that's it. But on my cell phone, unless I put the whole phone on "do not disturb", I cannot escape Slack.

The "disbale notifications on the specific channels" does not work for me, because I do not actually want to do so. I just want to not get notifications during off hours (or at meetings, family stuff, etc), and I not want to configure it (or set myself away) for every team I'm logged in (right now, that's 10 teams).

Slack needs a global "mute" button. Slack feels designed as if it's a complete surprise to the Slack devs that people might join more than one team. There is nothing about Slack that's global, other than being able to log into multiple teams on one instance of the application.

I've been waiting for a global mute button since forever, but these guys just keep assuming we're all part of only one Slack team.

alexozer• 9 years ago

Try Twist: https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

hfourm• 9 years ago

Looks cool although I think the article is overblowing the negatives of Slack-esque communication and underselling the benefits. Especially considering he was highlighting more about communication issues his team is facing that probably could have been addressed without switching tools.

ezrast• 9 years ago

There is no communication issue that cannot be addressed with Slack, because Slack imposes almost no structure on its users. That doesn't mean you want to use it for issue tracking. I think of Slack as UDP for humans - it's very powerful, but it's something you have to make work. If a higher-level communication protocol already exists that fits your needs, might as well use it.

valuearb2• 9 years ago

Ironically I dumped their product Todoist because they simply don't understand good UI design.

askafriend2• 9 years ago

CMD + Q.

Try it sometime. It's an effective shortcut.

Clubber2• 9 years ago

Agreed. That's the whole point of Slack, it's not limited to real time chat. When you need a break from what you are doing, open it. If you are busy, close it.

gm3• 9 years ago

Snarky answer does not take mobile devices into account.

cweagans• 9 years ago

You could just not install it on your mobile device.

askafriend2• 9 years ago

Turn off all Slack notifications for mobile and make it a "Pull" interaction with the service vs. a "Push" interaction.

It's what I do with a lot of services these days. I'm selective about what services can actually push to me.

Examples of services that are important enough to push to me include iMessage (large group chats muted), Uber/UberEats, Lyft, Instacart, etc. Basically notifications that are immediately actionable or important in the moment. Lots of delivery services fall into this category.

schrodingersbox• 9 years ago

Regarding slack on phone, unless it's a work phone, I'd say delete it. If it's a work phone, filter notifications for direct mentions or channel alerts.

As for slack on computer, I did several things: - snooze all notifications from 08:30AM to 08:00AM (because slack doesn't allow to do 24hour) - this means all channel/here won't trigger notifications and if someone is trying to talk to me, they get a slack tip asking them if they want to trigger a notification, even if I'm snoozed. I assume if something's really urgent they'll do so. Also, as someone mentioned here, the less available you seem, the less people will bother you, and if it's important, there's always a way.

- mute everything that's non-important or generates way to many messages - in large groups, almost always, there are lots of info that's not right away important, you can perfectly check it when you have the time.

- move slack over to browser - I did this for two reasons, first because it saves me RAM (hungry hungry slack) as I don't have another Chromium/Node instance running, and it also removes the red dot notification on my dock, meaning when I look at it, I won't be tempted to check slack for all the crap that constantly comes in. In the browser you have the red dot as well, but because the tab is pinned it's way less intrusive and it almost never bothers me.

All in all, you're getting paid to do your job, not to constantly reply to messages on slack, so this helps you prioritize your attention. I always remember that if something's really important people will bother you in other ways other than just slack. (I have been on-call and I stay true to this as well. When you get called, you open your computer and check what's going on. Constantly checking your phone is bad and does you way more harm than good)

lgas• 9 years ago

We've experienced the same problem and spoken with others that have as well so we have been working on a solution. We think Slack delivers on it's promise to free you from corporate email, but now we need to be freed from Slack.

Slack has an extensive set of options for managing notifications but they are channel-centric and not topic centric. You either disable notifications for a channel and receive nothing or you enable them and get notified of everything. We want to be notified of things we care about wherever they happen, whether we are a member of the channel or not. And we don't want to spend any time managing notification settings.

To solve this we've built a bot[0] that will let you subscribe to whatever keywords you want and will then notify you whenever those keywords are mentioned in any public channel (even if you are not a member). We've found that it has already helped us regain some of our sanity while not missing important conversations in slack.

Our high-level goal is to build tools that liberate us from the information overload that seems inevitable in the modern digital age. Focus is just one small step in that direction but we wanted to get feedback early and often, so please, check it out and let us know what you think!

0: http://www.focusforslack.com/

firelinks• 9 years ago

I would recommend switching from Slack to Skrumble (http://www.skrumble.com). Skrumble provides a lot more features that slack and conversations can be topic based rather than channel based.

si13b3• 9 years ago

Deactivate your account.

I'm serious, but of course your manager needs to support you in your decision. For me Slack represents a 20-30% productivity hit, and it should be Slack that justifies taking up my time rather than vice versa.

If someone needs to talk to me, they can email or approach my desk. I know this approach wouldn't be practical for remote teams. But perhaps some of the async communication options like Twist would work well?

t0mbstone3• 9 years ago

Wow. You really don't seem to understand how to use slack.

All anyone has to do to make slack manageable is just mute all of the channels they are in and disable notifications for anything except direct mentions and direct messages.

Done. Now you can still be reached for a direct chat (if necessary), but you aren't forcing people to write you a letter.

Anyone who thinks email is an efficient method of communication is a moron.

si13b3• 9 years ago

Do you always try to make your point by attacking people?

si13b3• 9 years ago

That's the whole point of my comment. Email is less efficient so it will discourage unnecessary communication. Only the important information is divulged and the useless chatter forgotten.

Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

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