Chat at work is killing my productivity.
Anyone using chat at the office can probably relate to this scenario:
[9:27] Colleague: Hi. Can I ask you a question?
[9:28] You: Yes.
Colleague is typing you a message…
…
…
[9:42] Colleague: Where are the TPS reports in Google Drive?
In Deep Work by Cal Newport, he argues that these types of micro-distractions encouraged by chat tools are the problem. Our brains aren’t wired to dip in and out of complex tasks and as a result nobody is able to focus on deep tasks for more than a few minutes at a time:
“But this sequence of thinking about thinking points to an inescapable conclusion: To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy.”
Humans aren’t wired for any sort of global, always-reachable communication. This is a a problem that applies to both synchronous and asynchronous communication, but I miss not having an expectation of replying — or even being present — for more than 24 hours at a time. In other words…I miss email.
Instead of getting things done I dread that ‘knock knock’ of Slack barging in, demanding my attention immediately. By contrast, email seems like the snail mail of the internet: a little bit old, but the way it forced you to work within it meant you could pigeonhole tasks easily.
We haven’t collectively considered that we’re already collapsing under the weight of our own personal notification overload, and by adding another layer we have to stare at all day, it’s only making things worse.
I think chat at work is, eventually, going to burn us all out.
Slack makes me want to go back to email
To argue that going back to email might be better sounds — even to myself — like some sort of insane nostalgia, but hear me out: email is better than the modern tools we’re pushing because it comes with pre-established social norms:
- Most of us know how to use it
- You can choose who to include or exclude by default
- Nobody expects an immediate email response, especially if you’re out of office.
- There’s a set of behavior norms that make email manageable. For example, no one would ever write an email that just says, “Hey Owen” to kick off a discussion — even if that means sometimes we use too many words.
Don’t mistake me for an email fan, I’m not. It’s full of its own problems, from the fact that you basically have no idea if a person saw your message at all, to the annoying RE: RE: RE: QUESTION RE: FW: UPDATE IMPORTANT! threads — but at least there was some understanding of priority.
When I’m using Slack, all I crave is Inbox Zero, which is now an impossibility. There’s no way to get to the bottom of Slack, it just keeps on coming.
So yes, we’ve gotten rid of “Kind Regards” and “I’m sorry for not looping back,” but w’vee traded it for a chat window overflowing with gratuitous gifs, banal questions, and thousands of alerts from GitHub commits we don’t really care about.
Listen, I don’t think there’s any chance we’re going to get rid of chat at work, and I’m not even sure we need to, but it’s time all of us learned how to use it.
Don’t get rid of chat, yet
Chat at work can be like inserting an open office directly into your skull, but if you separate concerns and set expectations on how people can interact with you on chat, it can have a huge impact on your day.
Chat is really effective at short feedback loops, and quickly gathering information from a bunch of people — if you use it right. Without rules or a framework for your team it becomes an unruly distraction that’ll swallow everyone’s days whole… and that’s what happens straight out of the box!
Here’s the framework I’ve used to help manage Slack overload, I’m sharing it here in the hopes that we can begin to develop some kind of shared understanding about what is “ok” when it comes to this powerful new communication tool.
1.Go offline. The most effective tool I’ve found for dealing with Slack is a simple one: killing the online indicator permanently by setting yourself to always be ‘away.’
If people don’t see a glowing green dot next to your name, they’re less likely to send something banal to you, an effective way of deflecting much distraction before it begins. It’s simple, but it works — and nobody will know.
Todoist launched its own Slack competitor recently, without push notifications enabled by default and with many tools to disable them entirely for long spans of time.
The company argues that real-time messaging is devaluing our attention spans, and even went as far as intentionally leaving out an online indicator from its tool:
“Without the presence indicator, our team has adapted to adding comments and sending messages whenever they need to. They have no way of knowing if the person is online, so they don’t expect an immediate response.”
2.Adjust expectations. This is far harder, especially if you’re not a manager: adjusting expectations of your team. Email comes with all of these social norms — you won’t reply if you’re out of office, being brief, that you can loop back in a day or two if you don’t hear back.
The most effective way to manage your chat overload is to slowly show people that if they message you on Slack you’ll reply in your own time, not that you’ll drop everything to fire back a response. Set boundaries using the ‘Do Not Disturb’ feature, and stick to them.
If someone messages you at night with “just a quick one” do not reply immediately even if it’s trivial. Instead, drop a message back in the morning stating explicitly you don’t check Slack at night, and perhaps email is a better way to get it seen and handled faster.
3.Set yourself ‘Slack’ hours. Having that floating window of endless messages open all day is insanely tempting, so just don’t do it. I know it feels like you’ll be missing out, but set yourself explicit time windows in which you’ll check Slack, and force yourself to kill it until then.
Set a reminder or calendar appointment on your phone if you have to, then jump in for 15–30 minutes of browsing and response, and cut it off again after that. If something is really urgent while you’re gone, they’ll call you.
4.Message thoughtfully. I still believe people who just say “Hello” before composing the rest of their message on chat are the worst, because it asks that you devote your attention to them entirely, even though they haven’t bothered to put the thought into it.
Please don’t just say hello in chat. The sooner you ask your actual question, the sooner you’ll get a real answer.
5.Deep task? Send an email. When you need thoughtful, deep responses from your team, switch to email. Don’t ask people for their thoughts about the company’s strategy in Slack, or you’ll be buried in one-line replies that don’t add much value.
If it’s something you really want people to sit and think about before they respond — not just with a hot take — then use any tool that’s asynchronous.
6.Chat is dead when you’re on vacation. No compromises. Uninstall the app, set your status to ‘on vacation’ and make sure to tell everyone you won’t be reachable, or when you return it’s hard to navigate managing what needs to become a task, and what is just a chat message for reading.
When you’re out of the office for a just few hours or days at a time, the expectation should be set that you won’t reply on Slack, because that’s not what you’re employed to do.
You’re not a chat operator, you’re an office worker, and it helps to separate the immediate response expectation people are wired to have when they message you on vacation.
Let’s all be better
Remember, chat tools are built to be addictive, so without a framework or a set of rules on how you’ll use them, it’s hard to pry yourself away.
Email might feel old, but there are times when it’s the right channel.
We can figure this out. We don’t need to sit back and let chat quietly ruin our productivity or eventually burn us out. Let’s be better, it’s time to get some damn work done.
