The channel for everything
Slack fixed several real problems. My day still feels more fragmented than it did when the tool was worse.
At some point in the last 18 months the agency stopped emailing each other. Not as a decision, nobody announced it. Email just quietly became the thing you use to talk to clients, and everything internal moved into channels, and now if you send an internal email people assume something has gone wrong.
I want to be clear before I start being ambivalent about this that the move was correct and I’d fight to keep it. But I’ve been keeping a slightly grim eye on my own days since about March, and I’ve got some thoughts, and most of them are about attention rather than about software.
Credit where it’s due
Three things, and they’re not small.
Decisions stopped happening in one person’s inbox. The old shape of a project was half a dozen threads that different subsets of people were on, so the reason we were doing something the odd way lived in an email chain that the person who inherited the project could not see. Now it’s in a channel, and the channel is searchable, and I have several times found the answer to “why is this like this” by searching for a client’s name and reading 11 months back.
Remote and part-time people stopped being second-class. When the medium was desk-side conversation plus email, anyone not in the room on a Tuesday afternoon was structurally out of the loop and had to be caught up by somebody who remembered to. That was a real inequality and it mostly wasn’t malice, it was physics. Written-by-default fixes it in a way that no amount of good intentions did.
And, personally, it lowered the cost of asking. I find it much easier to type a question into a channel than to walk over and interrupt someone who has headphones on. That’s a me thing rather than a general truth, but I suspect I’m not alone in it, and I’ve watched people who’d never have spoken up in a meeting become the most useful person in a channel.
The ten-second question
Here’s the bit I keep chewing on.
The pitch, and it’s a good pitch, is that a message is cheap. You fire off a question, the other person answers when they get to it, nobody’s blocked. It replaces the tap on the shoulder with something asynchronous and polite.
Except that isn’t what happened, or it isn’t what happened to me. What happened is that the cost of asking went to nearly zero and the cost of being asked stayed exactly where it was. Which is a very particular kind of imbalance, because it means the volume goes up and the price of the volume is paid by someone other than the person setting it.
A question that takes ten seconds to answer does not take ten seconds. It takes ten seconds plus however long it takes me to get back into what I was doing, and if I was halfway through holding a layout bug in my head, that number is not small and it isn’t linear. Four of those in an afternoon and the afternoon is gone, and the honest accounting says I answered 40 seconds of questions.
The cost of asking went to nearly zero. The cost of being asked stayed exactly where it was.
I don’t think anybody is doing anything wrong here, which is what makes it hard to raise. Every individual message is reasonable. It’s the aggregate that’s the problem, and nobody is in charge of the aggregate.
The green dot
The other thing I’ve noticed, and this one I’m less sure about so take it lightly.
There’s a little colored dot next to everyone’s name that says whether they’re active. It exists for a sensible reason, which is to tell you whether it’s worth waiting for a reply. But it is also, unavoidably, a visible signal of presence that sits next to your name all day, and I have caught myself, more than once, alt-tabbing back to keep it green.
Nobody at my place has ever mentioned the dot. No manager has ever said anything about response times. I want to be really clear that this is a pressure I have applied to myself, from a piece of interface design, with no help from anyone.
Which is worth saying out loud, I think, because it’s the mechanism by which “here’s a tool” becomes “here’s a norm” without anyone deciding anything. The tool made presence legible. Legible things get treated as measurements. Measurements get treated as targets, and then a thing that was meant to help you find out if someone’s about has become a low-grade performance of being about.
Do not disturb
Not much, and the things I’ve changed are embarrassingly small compared to how much I’ve thought about it.
I turned off notifications for everything except direct messages and my own name, which took about four months of nerve to do and has cost me nothing at all. It turns out I do not need to be told about the 14th message in a channel about a project I’m not on.
I’ve started using the snooze thing in the mornings, because mornings are when I’m any good, and I say so in the channel so it isn’t mysterious: back at 11, shout if it’s urgent. Nobody has ever shouted.
And I try to answer with the whole answer rather than in six fragments, because the six-fragment style is what the tool encourages and it turns one interruption into six for the person reading.
The one I haven’t managed is not being the problem for other people. I ask questions in channels constantly. I do it because it’s cheap for me, which is precisely the thing I’ve spent this post complaining about, and knowing that has not so far changed my behavior by any measurable amount.
Anyway, I’m not nostalgic for email, and if there’s a version of this post somewhere that ends with “we should go back,” it isn’t mine. The old way had a different set of costs and they landed hardest on the people who were already worst served. I’d just quite like us to notice that we adopted a piece of software and got a working culture, and that the second one arrived unexamined, in a box, with the first.
It might of course just be that I’m bad at concentrating and have found something to blame. I’ve considered that one at length. I keep not being convinced by it.