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I wondered why I was enjoying work without interruptions...
Now, seriously, how do we convince people to go back to less synchronous forms of communication such as e-mail?
Chat is pretty asynchronous for me. I only read or respond to things when my name is mentioned or if there's something particularly relevant or important going on.
I just mute notifications for all but the most important channels, and sometimes even mute those while working. That way you only get a notification for @everyone-type mentions, personal mentions, and personal messages, which is not unlike email.
Even doing that, I still think it's very distracting.
At that point, it's only distracting if you work with distracting people. Maybe without IM the barrier to being distracting would be having to go to your desk, but it would still be an occasional issue.
Anything other than a phone call or a face to face should be asynchronous.
I think it's unhealthy to expect something different.
Work someplace where you defending your time is encouraged and made a priority.
Slack is the remote work equivalent of "butts in chair" management. If you need information, outline what you need and email the person; allow them time to respond. Document that in a knowledge base if the data must persist and be disseminated. If you need to hold a meeting, hop on Zoom and record it, while you have a participant document the output. If you need something immediately (and it better be important), you can call or IM.
EDIT: @frogpelt said it better.
Seriously, how do we convince people to ditch email? I work with businesses that work with email every day, and it's horrible. It's an archaic technology, with multiple email providers and clients having their own 'standards' (hello Gmail + AMP), has a huge spam / reputation issue, and is just really a pain to work with.
> archaic technology
Just like HTTP.
> having their own 'standards'
What are you trying to send? HTML spam? Text mails work everywhere, the only annoyance you get is top/bottom quoting.
> huge spam / reputation issue
That's usually a problem admins deal with, not the users.
From the user's perspective, what's the difference between chat and email except for the look and feel of the client? It's just how you treat it.
Expectations.
People don't expect you to reply immediately to email.
you know you can mute notifications right? If you need to work interrupted for some amount of time just mute... if they need you that badly they can come to your desk
That works until someone gets really mad because you are ignoring them (and you are, actually, ignoring them for a couple hours).
Then that person needs to learn to respect personal boundaries
Thanks for the heads up I was wondering what was going on! In the future, linking to a company's status page (almost always located at status.companyurl) is even more helpful! https://status.slack.com in this case.
When something is down it's almost never immediately reflected on the status page. I always resort to Twitter.
same. didn't see anything on twitter too. (at least for the first five minutes)
when i first checked status.slack.com does show up. Still i couldn't reach slack.com. That's why put that on the link. (Looks like once posted can't update the URL)
Ah I see! Thanks for the explanation
Please link the status page next time like a normal person.
Tech productivity goes up 10x.
While it is still working for me, I have also seen some issues with some Office 365 services. According to Azure's Twitter account, there is also an outage going on there (although they have yet to update their status page for some reason).
"Try Slack with your team for free" should be become "Try Slack with your team for free with limitation of 10000 messages per month"
The message limitation works for a small group I'm in - we just export the messages every week and back them up to Github, so we don't really need Slack to archive for us.
I sure hope so; then I can actually get some work done.
Able to access now, but I was getting error 500.
Had a glitch but seems to be working now (NYC)
Not. Not here.
Confirmed down in Florida here.
Back up now.
No.
Edit (from 3 minutes later): maybe.
I do get an error 500, trying from Brazil.
aaand it's back
Working fine in WA.
yes, from san francisco