March 21, 2019

Is group chat making you sweat?

Jason Fried:

Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.

Forgive me @channel, for I have sinned.

As one of the main proponents of adopting Slack at my organization at the start of the year, I have mixed feelings with the results.

On one had, I do believe that it has been an improvement of the Skype free-for-all party that was the norm. It’s now easier to have an idea of what is happening on multiple remote teams ¹. Sharing is also way easier on Slack and, there’s more IT oversight over accounts and users — at least versus Skype.

However, how much better it is compared to just having clearer rules on Google Hangouts (which we have with our G-Suite account), is debatable. The Slack app itself is a much better experience, and the integrations are plain fun.

But just like social networks, there’s something to be said about these services need to grab attention. The fact that they feel like work, should make us even more suspicious.

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1. Main office plus 2 outsourced teams in San José, Costa Rica, and my office in Miami.↩︎

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