Slack off, mate

Back in my brief and not particularly illustrious stints as a manager I became slowly submerged under a rising tide of that modern scourge—email. Daily reports and requests for ‘resources’ (call me only fashioned but I much prefer the term ‘people’) to work on some urgent piece of work. The list was endless. Email was a terrible way to keep up with the dayto-day events in a team, though. It was with some relief that, leaving the ivory towers of corporations and their ‘enterprise’ email clients ( LotusNotes— shudder) and general reluctance to use the likes of IRC, I was able to replace email to some extent with group messaging.

Slack has become the current poster child of this increasingly common practice. There are alternatives, of course, some are open source (eg Mattermost, Rocket.chat) and others aren’t (eg Hipchat). There are common themes amongst all of these— everyone can see posts in realtime. Hook up the continuous integration system! Fire up alerting! They are quite addictive and fun (my daughter, on seeing the way that a company channel on Slack is used by one of my clients is now convinced that grownups just send each other pictures of cats and Spongebob all day long). In some smaller client workplaces, email isn’t used at all anymore, or only to communicate with the more distant parts of the business that ‘don’t get it’. In terms of being plugged into the day-to-day ‘hive mind’ of now frequently distributed teams it’s a much better solution than email.

There is a dark side to all this, however. I’ve found myself struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of messages. I’ve also found interruptions are common and switching off is extremely difficult to do. Hey, an alert! I’ll just take a quick look… and suddenly I’m bombarded. I’d love to hear reader experiences and recommendations about using it. jolyon.brown@gmail.com.