Productivity knocks: I've got 99 Slacks, but my work's not done

IRC

There is a reason why IRC will outlive Slack.

"In-country data storage? Nope, unless your country is the US. It's sitting on Amazon's Cloud, but on US-only instances."

Once the first Slack user gets hit under GDPR the panic is going to be worth watching.

"If I had a dollar for every time someone said Slack was the answer to a business's problems, I'd have retired to a beach in Australia long ago."

Somewhere a flat earther is reading that line, then taking the rest of the article as utter bullshit. Only because they're that backward they don't believe Austrailia exists. But then again would they ever be in a position of trust and responsibility where they'd need to use Slack?

Stride

We use Stride in our tiny 3 person startup - mostly because it's cheaper than Slack, and because we used to use HipChat. Given we're 3 people, mostly in the same room, we don't use it a huge amount, but two things seem quite broken with it:

- Uploading files: The UI is really unclear what's going on while a file uploads, this is especially noticeable on a slow internet connection.

- Notifications: These don't seem to reliably come through. HipChat used to support sending email notifications, but this was removed in Stride. We've seen notifications frequently fail to arrive on at least one of our Android devices, unless Stride is running in the background.

Between these two things, it's quite a frustrating platform, and I don't think we'd stick with it if we grow.

We used to use Skype

However Microsoft are ripping Skype to pieces, so we'll need to replace it soon.

But with what?

All these things seem to have pretty decent phone apps, but desktop versions are conspicuous by their absence or phone-styling.

IRC and Usenet

I think IRC and Usenet will outlive Slack, Whatsapp, Discord and many others I have already forgotten about.

Wot no keybase

I'm very in love with keybase teams - and they've made some pretty strong promises about not charging existing users in future. It's beautiful tech - and works well, in the small team I've used it with so far. https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-teams

Interruptions

Of course it reduces productivity. Every context switch costs time and energy and Slack allows you to interrupt colleagues any time, anywhere. It doesn't help if people don't read emails because of too many automated emails from other productivity tools - I noticed someone with 3000 unread emails the other day. So people Slack rather than email so as not to be ignored.

Other alternatives that are worth a look are Mattermost and RocketChat, which are basically host-your-own-Slack. Even compatible with all of Slack's add-on plugins.

*Edit:* Oh there's also Google's Hangout Chat which we tried as we have GSuite anyway but found pretty poor, mainly thanks to lack of integration with other services (due to not supporting Slack plugins) and really poor or missing client apps with broken notifications. I had had higher hopes.

short sighted

I never understood why people wanted to use Slack. The reason most often given seemed to be that they got too much email so that they couldn't use it any more.

Understandable, but Slack and friends are just alternative message systems. They doesn't solve anything, just make you available to a temporarily smaller group. As soon as it gets wide circulation it's just as bad. What are you going to do then - move to another one ?

A simpler method would be to just change your email address regularly.

Slack

Proof that the Keynesian-style "economic stimulus" via money printing is indeed working.

There money-laden people all over the place doing silly crap if not fuck all.

They all sound like things the office wankers would use to make themselves sound more important.

The value is all in how you use it

I currently view slack as a partial substitute / partial augmentation for office conversation. It is a fairly free form place to raise and discuss issues. While nothing can fully replace in person conversation, it does have one or two advantages.

- You can control the alerts you get and how often you look at it

- You can see what others have been chatting about in the public areas and keep in touch

- It works well when your tam are not collocated every day

- It allows the quick exchange of textual information

When a decision is made, that and a clear concise statement of how that decision was reached should be captured elsewhere (in our case mostly Jira but sometimes email) by the person who needed the decision made and flagging the people that were involved. This is just like you would following a regular conversation where an important decision was made.

Like a conversation I do not expect the record to persist and make the case to my team that it should be treated just like you were talking to people not a substitute for other tools.

Used like this Slack is great but we are not all that tied to it, if something that suits us better comes along we will switch to that.

Productivity

I've had so many productivity apps that have been foisted on me by IT, that I didn't have any time for any real work. EG Office, Word, Powerpoint, Outlook, Yammer, Skype, Agile Central, InfoPath, etc etc

Fascinating how a whole industry can be created...

...just by companies having incompetent enough IT departments to set up a private IRC server, or people being forced to use terribly bad e-mail clients which do not even quote propperly.

Seriously, if you want instant communications, there's XMPP or IRC, or the telephone. All three of which should be used in moderation, as their real time nature means that they are disturbing the recipient. (well maybe except for IRC which comes with a scroll buffer)

If you want something from a person, and it doesn't have to be _RIGHT_NOW_, E-Mail is your best chance to get it within a day or so.

Atlassian fans?

I don't think Atlassian have fans as much as people who think it does its job in a perfectly acceptable matter. It's one of those programs suites that you don't like, you just accept its existence and move on from there.

Take JIRA for example: The problem is almost never JIRA, it's that the suits want to model some process in JIRA, and that makes it more complex. But that's the process' fault, not JIRA. What ought to then happen is that we talk with the suits and create better processes that makes the tools easier to use, and projects go along better.

I've seen this happen in a public project, and they were more than willing to discuss how things should be done to make it happen in a smooth matter. So this should be within reach. I mean, everything from Rational RUP to Kanban Scrum 2000 LEAN edition supports this type of thinking, so...