1. Quiet Time

When we’re not playing guitar in a circle like a beautiful office commune (that has never happened outside of the photo op), you’ll likely find a nearly silent office full of headphone-wearing designers, developers, and writers. We have become well conditioned to limit the number of distractions in the office, thanks in large part to Slack being our communication hub.

But what do you do about Slack? The same thing. Select hours, half days, or full days and completely block them off as time people can and should stay off of Slack. Even better, make it mandatory and force people to close Slack. Anyone caught sneaking a meme in #random loses taco privileges.

2. Kick ’Em Out

Steve Jobs, when in a meeting with someone he felt wasn’t necessary, would politely ask them to leave. When someone is in a Slack channel when they aren’t necessary to the task being discussed, politely ask them to leave. Or /kick them and react with the 👢emoji.

This will immediately remove the stress associated with that person trying to keep up with a conversation that isn’t relevant to them in that moment, prevent them from feeling like they should needlessly follow along, and give you the satisfaction of using the👢emoji.

3. Turn Off Notifications

This isn’t for everyone, but if notifications are scary to you or they stress you out (I’m with you), turn them off. Slack never notifies me of anything. In order to know what is happening in Slack, I have to open and check Slack. If I don’t, it’s never on. Hey, there’s another “always on” fix! Two birds, one notification stone.

4. Ban The ASAP Culture

This is probably the most important point in this entire article. I pulled this from Jason Fried’s list of negatives:

2. An ASAP culture. Now! At its very core, group chat and real-time communication is all about now. That’s why in some select circumstances it really shines. But chat conditions us to believe everything’s worth discussing quickly right now, except that hardly anything is. Turns out, very few things require ASAP attention. Further, ASAP is inflationary — it devalues any request that doesn’t say ASAP. Before you know it, the only way to get anything done is by throwing it in front of people and asking for their immediate feedback. It’s like you’re constantly tapping everyone’s shoulder — or pulling on everyone’s shirt — to get them to stop what they’re doing and turn around to address what’s on your mind. It’s not a sustainable practice.

This shouldn’t exist. It simply shouldn’t. This is one of those issues where, if it has penetrated your culture, you probably have bigger fish to fry than Slack allowing you to continue making this mistake. Slack doesn’t condition a company to accept the ASAP culture nearly as much as the leaders within a company condition people to accept and allow this mentality.

Here’s Jason’s advice on the topic of ASAP and how to manage it within your business, from the book he co-authored, Rework:

“So reserve your use of emergency language for true emergencies. The kind where there are direct, measurable consequences to inaction. For everything else, chill out.”

Let’s apply that advice to Slack use: Reserve your @channel mentions for true emergencies. For everything else, chill out.

5. Use the App Appropriately

This is one of those solutions that can only really come from using the product. Slack is great for many, many things, but it’s often overused at something it’s not so great at: working through difficult problems by thinking a line at a time. This is a very real problem, but it stems from a misuse of the toolset available in an application like Slack.

I spend a considerable amount of time writing articles, outlines, and internal messages, and Slack’s Post feature is a phenomenal tool for that use case (but seriously, Slack, you need to add spellcheck to Posts on Mac, like, 6 months ago). I am able to write and share an article (with a lot of typos, because spellcheck is missing) with our team and receive comments back, when the person is available, directly associated with that Post (that spells hierarchy as “heirarchy” because… you get the point). Using Slack’s features as intended makes it a great tool for thinking through a problem and receiving feedback later.

What wouldn’t work so well is 56 lines of scattered thought, but Slack seems well prepared for many different use cases if we understand and educate ourselves on the tool. Then again, if I sent you 56 emails for every line I typed instead of writing the entire email and hitting send, I would expect you to think I was being pretty silly.

One of the reasons we value Slack as highly as we do is because it’s much more than a group chat app. If used effectively and appropriately, Slack can replace many internal tools while streamlining internal processes by intelligently incorporating integrations.

6. Don’t Use Slack as a Hat

Just as we have to understand how to appropriately use the features of Slack, we also must understand what Slack should not be used for (yet). Well, probably never as a hat, but we’ll see. They have some very smart people over there.

One of the biggest problems we have with Slack is that we don’t really have a way to delay messages. Reminders work for small needs but not for larger requests. Let’s say we’re heading out early for the day and need something from someone before we start in the morning: It’s tempting to drop an @ mention, but now we’ve interrupted someone’s productive time at 3pm. This is something Slack isn’t good at (yet), so we turned to another tool, Wunderlist, to solve this problem. Slap the need on the appropriate person’s list, assign a time it’s due, set a reminder for them if necessary, and get your happy ass out of the office and enjoy the day.

We run into quite a few of these issues but typically find pretty quickly that we’re trying to use Slack for something it’s not meant to do. We enlist a few other tools, and often we can quickly identify which tool would be more appropriate to solve the problem at hand without wrecking someone else’s concentration. Then, after you know the tool you’ll be using, you can probably add the integration to Slack.

6. Sign out of Other Groups

One of the primary concerns I’ve heard about Slack from friends and in the articles outlining the faults of group chat is how many groups people have signed up for. In Samuel’s tragedy, he admits to being a part of ten different Slack teams. TEN! I don’t think I’ve been a part of ten things at once in my entire life, much less Slack teams.

I am currently on three Slack teams — Mostly Serious, Springfield Creatives, and one that includes industry peers and friends I would otherwise keep in touch with using similar tools like iMessage or email. The two non-work teams are set to Do Not Disturb during work hours to avoid the hassle of trying to explain to Ted why I care about this topic as much as I do. Those conversations can wait until I’m sitting on my couch watching Baskets.

The part I don’t understand is why on Earth someone makes a poor decision to join ten Slack teams and then wonders why the poor decision has led to a poor result. If you bring even a few of your friends to work with you, they are going to be distracting and your boss is going to wonder what the hell you’re doing. It’s probably time to tell your friends you have work to do and Mom won’t let you play on Slack until you finish.