As far as Iām aware, most of the biggest EA organizations are heavy users of Slack, which is somewhat better on these fronts than email. Theyāre also generally friendly to researchers who have a personal policy of checking email infrequently (as itās widely recognized how distracting email can be).
Iām in favor of much of what this article recommends; I just think weāre on that path already. (Iād be interested to see concrete anti-email suggestions that could push us even further, though!)
Could you explain how Slack is better on these fronts than email? My intuition is that Slack would be worse on these fronts than email (I think in part because Iāve seen one or two medium posts that talk about the always on IM culture and how it makes it harder to do focused work).
Slackās not perfect, but here are some features I like:
Emotes let you ārespondā to a message in less than a second with zero typing. At CEA, we have an āeyesā emote that means āIāve seen this messageā, which saves me 30 seconds over sending a āthanks for sending this, Iāve read itā email. We have lots of other emotes that stand in for other kinds of quick messages. I send a lot less email at CEA than I did in my most recent corporate job, at a tech firm with pretty standard messaging practices.
Channels act as a proactive sorting system. CEA has an āimportantā channel for time-sensitive things that everyone should read and a āgeneralā channel for things that everyone should read, but that arenāt time-sensitive. If all the messages on those channels were emails, Iād wind up reading them all as they came in, but in Slack I can ignore most of them until I hit the time in my day when I want to catch up on messages, without spending any energy on sorting.
Slack also has a feature that lets you set āstatusesā in the same way the HBR article discusses (e.g. āworking on important thing, available after 4:00 pmā), which takes less time than writing an auto-reply and also doesnāt add dozens of automated emails to other peopleās inboxes when they try contacting you.
As far as Iām aware, most of the biggest EA organizations are heavy users of Slack, which is somewhat better on these fronts than email. Theyāre also generally friendly to researchers who have a personal policy of checking email infrequently (as itās widely recognized how distracting email can be).
Iām in favor of much of what this article recommends; I just think weāre on that path already. (Iād be interested to see concrete anti-email suggestions that could push us even further, though!)
Could you explain how Slack is better on these fronts than email? My intuition is that Slack would be worse on these fronts than email (I think in part because Iāve seen one or two medium posts that talk about the always on IM culture and how it makes it harder to do focused work).
Slackās not perfect, but here are some features I like:
Emotes let you ārespondā to a message in less than a second with zero typing. At CEA, we have an āeyesā emote that means āIāve seen this messageā, which saves me 30 seconds over sending a āthanks for sending this, Iāve read itā email. We have lots of other emotes that stand in for other kinds of quick messages. I send a lot less email at CEA than I did in my most recent corporate job, at a tech firm with pretty standard messaging practices.
Channels act as a proactive sorting system. CEA has an āimportantā channel for time-sensitive things that everyone should read and a āgeneralā channel for things that everyone should read, but that arenāt time-sensitive. If all the messages on those channels were emails, Iād wind up reading them all as they came in, but in Slack I can ignore most of them until I hit the time in my day when I want to catch up on messages, without spending any energy on sorting.
Slack also has a feature that lets you set āstatusesā in the same way the HBR article discusses (e.g. āworking on important thing, available after 4:00 pmā), which takes less time than writing an auto-reply and also doesnāt add dozens of automated emails to other peopleās inboxes when they try contacting you.