On Getting Rid of Slack
It’s been over 1 year since we got rid of Slack for Project 33—and it’s been amazing.
Why did I get rid of it?
1. In my opinion, Slack has an ASAP culture. When people send you a Slack message, they expect an immediate answer. So your day gets interrupted by constant pings and notifications and you end up not getting any real work done.
Can you have the discipline to keep Slack closed or turn off all notifications? Sure, but it's not built for that. Oftentimes, the files you're working with are in Slack, so you need to have it open while working. Also, people expect you to answer. When we still used Slack, it happened regularly that a client would ask a question and 5min later would ask "Did you see my message?" if I didn't respond right away. That never happened since we moved back to email.
"But what if I need an immediate response?" Our brains are tricky. 99% of things we think are urgent, aren't actually. For the other 1%, you can call me.
2. Slack is a chat tool. And chat tools incentivize people to write incomplete sentences and half-finished thoughts. You just blurt out a quick thing in the chat because it’s easy. You end up getting questions from people that they could've figured out themselves if they had thought about it for 2min. Or you end up having 5 back-and-forths just to figure out what the other person wants from you because they thought they could skip the effort of writing complete sentences.
What’s hard? To write a cohesive, thought-through email—you know, the ones with complete sentences and where you communicate everything you need to communicate in one bulk that makes it easy for the other person to understand it immediately. In the end, they end up saving you time because you have fewer back-and-forths and cut out all the communication that wasn't necessary in the first place and only happened because it's so easy to send a quick message on Slack. Friction is a feature, not a bug.
So over a year ago, we moved all internal communication over to Basecamp and all client communication back to email. I know, I know, email is "so old-school"—but it’s so much better in my opinion.