Use Slack. Not too much. Mostly like email.

As many of us are making a swift transition to fully-remote work, I’ve been thinking lately about how we communicate in a distributed world. If you work in tech, “how we communicate” probably means “we just kind of pile into Slack and hope for the best.”

If your work requires any amount of uninterrupted focus, then you’re probably already familiar with the challenges that Slack can represent. When you and all your coworkers are in the office together, you’ve got to get up from your desk and walk over to the person you need to talk to and maybe do the awkward attention dance if they’re wearing headphones. I believe that without being deliberate in how you and your teammates use Slack, the best case is a virtual version of people showing up at your desk all day long - and the worst case is something that takes a severe toll on your ability to focus.

I’m going to detail some of the strategies I’ve been using lately to reduce interruptions, communicate more clearly, and make Slack a better tool. In a nutshell, I believe that treating Slack more like email makes it a much more manageable tool - here’s how I do that.

I’m going to refer to Slack here as a stand-in for basically any instant messaging solution, not because Slack is somehow fundamentally worse than any other similar tool.

• Provide as much up-front context as you can.
• Make it clear when you need a response.
• Set expectations around when you’ll respond.
• Conclusion

Provide as much up-front context as you can#

You’ve probably been a part of many Slack conversations that go like this:

Statler: 👋

Waldorf: [some minutes later] Hello.

Statler: [further minutes later] Wondering if you have time for a quick question?

Waldorf: [maybe the next day] Yeah, sure.

Statler: [hours having gone by] Cool! I’m looking at this JIRA ticket, and…

What’s wrong with this?

• The recipient must stop what they’re doing and acknowledge you to push the discussion forward. Like the digital equivalent of having someone walk up to your desk or call your phone, you are forcing a synchronous conversation when an asynchronous one is desirable.

• The recipient doesn’t have the luxury of choosing when to respond. Without any clue as to what Statler needs, Waldorf can’t figure out if this is urgent or not.

• Because the recipient has no context from the initial messages, an awkward ping-pong of clarifying questions is likely to result. If the two participants happen to be on different schedules, this conversation might drag on for days while both parties try to get the information they need.

Now imagine if this conversation took place via email. It would probably look more like this:

Statler: 👋 I’ve been looking into this JIRA ticket, and reading through the linked commits, it seems like you and your team were working on this problem most recently. I noticed that you opted to put more of this data into the existing tables - do you have any concerns with instead moving it out to a different storage option?

Waldorf: [at a time when they can focus on responding] Hey! We opted to do that because it was the quickest option and didn’t seem like it would increase complexity by much. Our design doc on that is here, and you can see under the storage subheading…

This is an immediate improvement, in my opinion.

• The recipient can scan the message and see that there isn’t a need to reply immediately. They can continue focusing on what they’re currently doing, and then shift their focus to a thoughtful reply to the message when they’re able.

• Both messages contain enough up-front context that there isn’t much of a need for clarifying questions. The recipient gets a clear sense of the situation and what the ask is, and can compose their response without asking more questions that might take a while for the petitioner to see.

Compared to Slack, email is a medium that does not train us to expect an immediate response. In general, you have no idea if the person you’re emailing is online, reading your message, or composing a reply. Slack will tell you all of these things in real-time, and this motivates us to begin expecting much quicker responses. How many times have you waited for someone’s status indicator in Slack to turn green before sending a message?

In a fully-remote world, this makes a real difference because it’s not nearly as reasonable to assume that your working schedule aligns with all of your coworkers’. The people you need to work with might be in another timezone or working adjusted hours to help with childcare, which means that it’s much more onerous to demand a synchronous conversation when it’s not otherwise necessary.

So, tip number one: compose your Slack messages with as much up-front context as possible, as if you were sending an email and won’t get an immediate response.

Make it clear when you need a response#

As mentioned above, Slack trains us to expect immediate responses from our coworkers. In a fully-distributed company, this is an unrealistic expectation for most of the work we do.

However, the reality is that some messages and conversations do need to happen in real-time. There are plenty of times where you’ll need to get someone’s attention and get some information from them sooner rather than later (for actual emergencies, you really should be using Pagerduty or Opsgenie, etc., but that’s beyond the scope of this article).

For many people, without clear expectations around urgency, the default behavior will be to assume that all messages are urgent and that everything taking place is Slack is noteworthy and needs immediate attention. The effect of this is an “attention treadmill”: you can’t ignore any notification that you receive because you might be missing something important!

How do we fix this? Make it clear to recipients when we’d like a response to the messages we’re sending. Let’s look at an example.

Statler: Hey, I saw some exceptions in production and was hoping you knew about this.

Waldorf: Is this urgent? I just finished up for the day, but I’m around.

Statler: [the next morning] Hey, no urgency - they’re all handled, but I was curious about…

Waldorf: [screaming internally]

This kind of conversation happens all the time - we start a conversation about something that might be alarming (errors in production!) without setting expectations about the urgency. Most well-meaning recipients of such a message will at least try and be responsive, even if it’s a severe imposition for them to do so.

To avoid this, all we have to do is be upfront about how urgently we need a response. If it’s not urgent:

Statler: Hey - this isn’t urgent at all. I noticed these handled exceptions in prod, and I wondered if we need to be logging them at all.

Waldorf: [the next morning] Sure, that makes sense - I can work up a change to…

If it is urgent, then make that need clear!

Statler: Hey, got a bit of an urgent issue here - we’ve got a customer in support chats who can’t…

Waldorf: Cool, I’m here - let me catch up on the situation.

Many people are pretty good about indicating when their messages aren’t urgent. It’s also essential to clarify when you need an immediate answer to help prevent folks from assuming that all messages are critical.

Therefore, tip number two: don’t be afraid to set clear expectations around how urgently you’d like a response.

Set expectations around when you can respond#

This last tip might be the most difficult for many folks, but it might be the most important. Slack conditions people to expect an immediate response to their messages, sure - but when you reply immediately to everything that you can, you’re doing the same thing. Many conscientious people who really ought to be focusing on other things make themselves too available on Slack and reply immediately to their various DMs. When 5 PM rolls around, they wonder why they didn’t get anything done.

You can coach folks gently into being deliberate about urgency by setting clear boundaries around when you will or won’t see and reply to messages. One example of how to do this is to make judicious use of the Pause Notifications feature (formerly known as Do Not Disturb). If you’ve never used it before, it’s under where you’d go to update your status.

When you pause your notifications, Slack will stop showing push notifications and badges for new messages that you receive, and your status indicator will show a zzz. The most important part of this is that anyone who DMs you will receive a little prompt along the lines of “so and so has paused their notifications, but they’ll see it when they get back” and a button that allows them to send a notification anyway.

Pausing notifications is a deceptively powerful tool that folks ought to use more often. As mentioned earlier, it’s often hard to set yourself in a “Do not disturb” mode because nobody wants to come off as unapproachable. Pausing your notifications can gently coach people into thinking more carefully about what is or isn’t urgent when they DM you: if it’s not that important, they can send the message, and you’ll reply when you can focus on it.

If it is time-sensitive, then all they have to do is click the button to send you a notification anyway. You’ll also begin getting yourself off of the attention treadmill: you’ll only get notifications for the things your teammates think are actually urgent, and maybe realize how many of those new messages aren’t all that relevant after all.

In a similar vein, consider being active in updating your Slack status to reflect when you’re out of office, not working, at lunch, etc. Many of my coworkers use an app called Clockwise that integrates with your calendar and will update your status automatically. I’ve begun updating my status when I’m in DND mode with a link to a doc that reads, “Hey! I’m focusing on work right now and will reply to any messages when I can focus completely on composing a response, but please don’t hesitate to click the send notification button if you need my attention now!”.

With that, we have the final tip for this article: help your coworkers by setting clear boundaries on when you will or won’t reply to messages.

Conclusion#

By treating Slack less like a real-time firehose of communication and more of an asynchronous medium like email, you can reduce the amount of time you spend getting interrupted and hopefully find more space to focus on the things that need your attention.

The solution is clearly not to stop communicating with each other altogether - the nature of almost everyone’s work requires a certain amount of coordination with our coworkers. But when we fail to be thoughtful and deliberate about how we coordinate and communicate with each other, the systems that spring up are very rarely the optimal ones.

Going fully-remote is a new and scary thing for a lot of folks. Even if the world were a less chaotic place right now, it is easy to feel unproductive, distracted and disengaged when you’re always on edge and trying to pay attention to everything that happens in Slack. However, I think that’s like trying to pay attention to all of the chatter that might have been happening in a physical office - it’s impossible and silly. Hopefully, some of the tips here can make your experience with Slack at least a little bit better.