Slack is a cloud-based communication and project management tool that’s been around since 2013 and those who use it have been singing its praises for years, so it’s about time we entertained the possibilities for adopting it. For years, we’ve been using Google chat to discuss off-the-cuff project matters, and we like that it can be used with multiple chat clients on many different kinds of devices. (We’ve even been known to customize the alerts so that they sound more like a calm piano glissando than a jarring beep.) We like that it’s easy to search and the space for such chats is unlimited. Keep in mind that we’ve been using it for about 8 years, so we have a lot of equity in Google Chat.
But… Google Chat was officially discontinued on June 26, 2017. (It still works, though!) And, of course, Google Chat is not a project management tool. In addition to Google Chat, we’ve always used email. Some of our vendors have requested that we use platforms like Microsoft Sharepoint and Asana. We had our brief period flirtation with Wrike, another project management tool. And on top of all of these we’ve always used email to communicate project details. Some urgent messages are even sent by text, a medium we’ve been discouraging for many years.
How Slack Works
Slack is very simple to use. You start by setting up an account and sending invitations to members of your team. Then you simply create “channels” for various topics. You could have a channel for each project, or a channel for, say, your design team, or a general channel that can be seen by all members of your team. And you can set up private channels for direct messaging a particular team member (or members). It’s a very efficient way to communicate—much more so than email.
And Slack offers a great number of integrations. If you already share documents on Google Drive, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, or Dropbox, Slack can connect to those platforms and make your document management process easier.
But…
Our internal team doesn’t communicate by email that much. If we’re launching a project and there’s a need for deep discussion, we might have that in person or over the phone. Most emails fall into one of three categories:
- “Please do this task.”
- “Yes, I approve this.”
- “No, please change that.”
Where we could achieve real efficiency is in communicating with clients. The essential problem here is that we are here to make our clients’ lives easier, not vice versa. Asking them to adopt a technological tool is not something we’re going to do.
The Dark Side of Slack
Slack is yet another work platform commanding your attention. With email or text, we exercise some discipline about what we’re asking a team member. As mentioned above, the vast majority of our email and text communication is disciplined to cover one of the three questions above, and it takes into consideration the recipient’s schedule. If one of us sends a text, it’s almost certainly an urgent matter needing immediate attention. If it’s an email, the recipient can decide when to respond. If it’s a chat, all participants have consciously decided they have time to engage in rapid-fire questions and answers. We don’t use chat while pulled over in a parking lot. We don’t use email to ask a dozen questions and answers (at least, not internally). And we don’t use text to ask a question that can wait a few days for an answer.
There is no substitute for discipline in your communications.
Slack doesn’t fit neatly into one of those three categories of consent for your attention. It demands a continuous portion of your attention. If you don’t open Slack for a few days, you may have missed vital parts of a decision-making process. But if you treat Slack like a chat app, which it certainly can be, you sacrifice part of your brainspace that might be better used to do the actual work. The more channels, the more distraction.
The other issue with Slack is that it is “freemium” software. While you can have almost unlimited users per channel (over 8,000!), the free plan “only” lets you search up to 10,000 of your most recent messages. And let’s face it… with almost a decade of working together, it’s going to be more useful to search email and Google Chat history for information about those old projects. Slack will probably be around for a while, but do we want to build that equity into yet another platform where we’ll have to search and catalogue information? Which is going to be around longer, Google or Slack?
We think we know the answer. But if you’re a Slack lover, we’re ready to entertain new opinions. Let us know in the comments!
