<story><title>How to make Slack less bad for you</title><url>http://robertheaton.com/2016/08/23/how-make-slack-slightly-less-bad-for-you/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ktamura</author><text>I cannot recommend using Slack via a browser enough. It achieves several goals:&lt;p&gt;1. It sandboxes resource usage, preventing Slack from being a permanent resource hog. Is your Slack tab running hot on Chrome? Just kill it for now. There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.&lt;p&gt;2. Closing the Slack browser tab means no disruptive notifications. Sure, you can snooze Slack @-mentions, etc., but that&amp;#x27;s too much of &amp;quot;working hard to make the tool work.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;3. Better workflow (seriously) Perhaps this is just me (or my function as a marketing person at a startup), but I work almost entirely inside the browser (GMail, Google Docs, various sites for research, SaaS apps). Using Slack as a standalone desktop app means I have to focus away from the browser. Using Slack as a browser tab means I can treat it just one of several web apps I use regularly.&lt;p&gt;4. Bonus point: No need to update your Slack client =)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikekchar</author><text>I use slack in irssi.  I think I actually get better benefits.&lt;p&gt;1. irssi is ridiculously low resource usage.  It never melts down.&lt;p&gt;2. No notifications by default.  I actually have a script that gives me notifications.  It&amp;#x27;s quite cool because I filter the messages by regexp so that I only see what I want to see.  Also, it uses my normal desktop notifications which means that they show up where I want them to, with the right font, in the right colour, lasting for the time I want them to.  One tip: my default notifications do not stay up long enough to read them.  It just gives me an indication that people are talking.  I can notice a word or two and if it strikes my interest I can go to irssi and see what they are talking about.&lt;p&gt;3. I&amp;#x27;m a programmer, so I&amp;#x27;m always in my console.  Same sauce, different flavour ;-)&lt;p&gt;I occasionally use slack from the browser because it has some features which are useful (like showing images), but I do that only on demand.&lt;p&gt;One of the things that is useful is that the people who like using slack on my team also have a lot of experience with IRC.  They have good etiquette.  Chatter is kept in the right channels so that it can be ignored easily.  Work channels are about work and have a really high signal to noise ratio.  Some teams are so good at it that if I want to get an overview of what&amp;#x27;s going on in their project I can simply subscribe to their slack channel.  It&amp;#x27;s great for me since I work remote.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to make Slack less bad for you</title><url>http://robertheaton.com/2016/08/23/how-make-slack-slightly-less-bad-for-you/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ktamura</author><text>I cannot recommend using Slack via a browser enough. It achieves several goals:&lt;p&gt;1. It sandboxes resource usage, preventing Slack from being a permanent resource hog. Is your Slack tab running hot on Chrome? Just kill it for now. There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.&lt;p&gt;2. Closing the Slack browser tab means no disruptive notifications. Sure, you can snooze Slack @-mentions, etc., but that&amp;#x27;s too much of &amp;quot;working hard to make the tool work.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;3. Better workflow (seriously) Perhaps this is just me (or my function as a marketing person at a startup), but I work almost entirely inside the browser (GMail, Google Docs, various sites for research, SaaS apps). Using Slack as a standalone desktop app means I have to focus away from the browser. Using Slack as a browser tab means I can treat it just one of several web apps I use regularly.&lt;p&gt;4. Bonus point: No need to update your Slack client =)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maw</author><text>&lt;i&gt;There are many browser extensions for managing resource usage per tab.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any clues on what to google for? I&amp;#x27;ve tried the Great Suspender and wasn&amp;#x27;t very impressed.</text></comment>