<story><title>Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/slack-is-the-right-tool-for-the-wrong-way-to-work</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s what this conversation always boils down to:&lt;p&gt;Slack is a tool, just like one of probably dozens you use in your day-to-day work. It doesn&amp;#x27;t set or enforce any guidelines for how it should be used. If left unchecked it has a tendency to amplify the worst parts of your company&amp;#x27;s culture. If you make an effort to moderate it, it can be a huge asset to productivity.&lt;p&gt;Speaking of the example in the article, there is absolutely no reason clients should have direct message channels with your company&amp;#x27;s employees and expect to get a response 24&amp;#x2F;7. This is true with email, Slack, SMS and every other form of communication.&lt;p&gt;The criticism I most often hear is &amp;quot;Slack expects me to be online all the time&amp;quot;. No, YOUR COMPANY expects you to be online all the time. Slack can be closed with one click.</text></comment>
<story><title>Slack is the right tool for the wrong way to work</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/slack-is-the-right-tool-for-the-wrong-way-to-work</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>oneplane</author><text>Slack is fine and works fine. As a user, you can very easily turn it off and on at will, mute it, even set status messages like &amp;quot;I will check my messages twice a day&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of &amp;#x27;product X is bad&amp;#x27; write-ups, but all of them try to blame something while the blame is for something intangible which is much harder to write a clever title for.&lt;p&gt;Same goes for the open office; that can work just fine if you make sure everyone shuts their mouth while working; having your &amp;#x27;own&amp;#x27; office space with lots of distractions isn&amp;#x27;t any better than having a &amp;#x27;shared&amp;#x27; space with the same distractions. The problem is the distraction, not the space. At best you would state that a certain type of space makes a certain type of distraction easier to occur. But that&amp;#x27;s a lot more words when you catch more eyeballs with &amp;#x27;office bad, isolation good&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Before we complained about the office, home, or Slack, we complained about Email. And before that about the phone and the pager. This isn&amp;#x27;t new. What&amp;#x27;s new is the scale and the amount of people not taking steps to do what works for them.</text></comment>