Shut Down Your Office. You Now Work in Slack.
Everything public is searchable — so, “just through the regular process of communication,” as Slack founder Stewart Butterfield puts it, “the team builds an archive that’s incredibly valuable.”
.. When you drop a shared link into a message, Slack pulls in summaries, images and videos, a la Facebook. You can store files in it and find them easily (unlike your email attachments).
.. For a generation, most office work has happened in two venues: meetings and email. Slack maps a route around both of these time-sucking maelstroms.
.. At first, it made no sense! If you thought of email as the digital equivalent of post-office mail, why on earth would you send it to the person sitting across from you? Why would you send a message all the way up to the server and backjust to get it to the inbox of someone sitting 20 feet away from you?
.. And it can put email back in its original place, as a vehicle for messaging across organizational boundaries.
.. “If you can create a temporary asynchronous channel that is tied to a specific set of people and that you can use for a period of time, and then once it’s finished, you can get rid of it — all of which Slack makes super easy — then half of our meetings start disappearing! Like, why have that meeting?”
.. “About half of the product managers no longer have any regular meetings. Instead they have a time of day, each day, when everyone just posts what they’re working on. If you have a question, that’s the point at which you can ask.
.. Jordan sees a downside to Slack. “You’re expected to be on all the time. Slack basically follows you — it’s really smart about it. It starts at your desktop, and if it doesn’t get a response within a certain amount of time, it goes to your phone, and if it doesn’t get a response on the phone, it goes to your email. So the sender knows there’s no way you didn’t see their message. And that comes with expectations.”