This is incredibly timely for me. We have grown from a team of 2 to a team of 18 in the past year, we're all remote and we literally huddle around Slack and warm ourselves to it's glow from morning till night. It's the core of our company culture and our comms.
I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing I'm feeling as a CEO. It's a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as the company scales and you feel like you're always-on from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them at night. I think it's a symptom of a virtual office and team. A real office on the other hand would provide that very real sense of driving home in the evening that gives you a very solid separation from work, the team, the opportunities and the issues.
To be clear: I'll never go back to a physical office, both for my own benefit and that of my team's.
I became aware of this problem with being always-on recently. I also started giving rather short unvarnished answers to questions on Slack and I realized something had changed. I've put it down to having no sense of quiet time. I don't mean not having any 'quiet time' but having no 'sense of quiet time' because someone might have messaged me. So even if I set myself to away, I'm still checking in just in case I dropped the ball because someone is waiting for a reply.
I've changed two things so far to try and fix this:
- Taking long walks (in addition to my regular bike rides) with Slack off.
- I still code, so I turn Slack off and set my alarm for 1.5 hours from now or whenever I need to be back on. Then turn Slack off.
Things I'm considering:
- Banning Slack after a certain time at night (for me personally). Perhaps 8pm.
- Banning Slack for myself until I'm "on" in the mornings.
Being a remote team I see Slack as absolutely essential and I don't think we could do without it. We are very productive via slack and we share music, jokes, news, ideas for blog posts and many other things via Slack. We also do our voice calls via Slack and we don't use video on purpose because it's distracting. So for us, Slack won't go away any time soon. I think if you can manage it, it's an amazing team platform.
On a broader note: I think digital addiction is a real problem. I think it's subtle and it involves checking the same thing more than 20 times a day in a non-productive obsessive way. Think Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, hitting refresh on a SaaS thing that gives you a quick endorphin or adrenaline rush and of course Slack. I think the symptoms are subtle, the behavior is widely accepted as normal and it's destructive in several ways.
So I think it's important to develop a discipline that allows us to exist online safely, productively and in good health. I think what this discipline is is just beginning to emerge in our culture because the problem of digital addiction and being always-on is only beginning to be recognized.
Posting an update on this for anyone else in a growing org using Slack: Our team chatted today and decided to keep using Slack because it's awesome for remote teams and our needs. It works well for us. What we are doing now though is to us the 'Snooze' function which lets you set it on a timer. Then when someone msgs you they are told that you're in snooze mode and given the option to 'break through' the snooze and alert you anyway. We've agreed we'll only do that if it's urgent.
I think this will work well and probably scale well too.
Digital addiction, especially with communications tools, has been a very real problem since the 1990s at least (with regard to Internets) and has become prevalent with the rise of social networks.
I've built and run several companies since the 1980s and always tried from the start to instil a culture of respect for other people's focus, which ranges from (as CEO) not 'looming' at their office door/desk expecting them to interrupt their focus to not 'telling' (asking) them to do something over a real-time communications channel (since the power differential will often cause them to interrupt something more important).
That means people don't interrupt or distract others without first asking politely via a non-realtime method (e.g. email) unless there's a genuine emergency (servers are down!).
Additionally, people should not feel obligated to stop what they're focused on to help someone else unless that is part of their role.
On the other hand if they're running out of steam, and need a distraction to get their thoughts back in gear, then catching up on help requests or doing something 'social' is OK, including getting outside for some fresh air.
With the increasing ubiquity of communications tools a key management activity is helping people to not feel obligated to be tied to them.
For example, with IRC and other real-time chat channels where there's a growing expectation that people are logged in all the time: don't! When you're done, log-out. Don't feel the need to have to 'scroll-back' to review history since you were last there. Treat it like entering and leaving a physical building - if you're not there, you will miss what is said.
From that comes the well-practised requirement in the non-tech business world that important discussions and especially decisions should be documented (some business sectors require this anyhow) and formalised (via arranging meetings with all stakeholders).
Don't assume people who don't respond immediately will ever see what you typed. If it is important to document it in a non realtime way; email, issue tracker, wiki, or whatever suits.
And as CEO ensure your people are NOT logging-in/commenting out-of-hours unless that is part of their job. Ensure they maintain a positive life/work balance in favour of their life, even if you have to send them home (as I've done many times with programmers that 'just need to finish this bit' and who you know will likely be there 3 hours later if you leave them).
I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing I'm feeling as a CEO. It's a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as the company scales and you feel like you're always-on from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them at night. I think it's a symptom of a virtual office and team. A real office on the other hand would provide that very real sense of driving home in the evening that gives you a very solid separation from work, the team, the opportunities and the issues.
To be clear: I'll never go back to a physical office, both for my own benefit and that of my team's.
I became aware of this problem with being always-on recently. I also started giving rather short unvarnished answers to questions on Slack and I realized something had changed. I've put it down to having no sense of quiet time. I don't mean not having any 'quiet time' but having no 'sense of quiet time' because someone might have messaged me. So even if I set myself to away, I'm still checking in just in case I dropped the ball because someone is waiting for a reply.
I've changed two things so far to try and fix this:
- Taking long walks (in addition to my regular bike rides) with Slack off. - I still code, so I turn Slack off and set my alarm for 1.5 hours from now or whenever I need to be back on. Then turn Slack off.
Things I'm considering:
- Banning Slack after a certain time at night (for me personally). Perhaps 8pm. - Banning Slack for myself until I'm "on" in the mornings.
Being a remote team I see Slack as absolutely essential and I don't think we could do without it. We are very productive via slack and we share music, jokes, news, ideas for blog posts and many other things via Slack. We also do our voice calls via Slack and we don't use video on purpose because it's distracting. So for us, Slack won't go away any time soon. I think if you can manage it, it's an amazing team platform.
On a broader note: I think digital addiction is a real problem. I think it's subtle and it involves checking the same thing more than 20 times a day in a non-productive obsessive way. Think Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, hitting refresh on a SaaS thing that gives you a quick endorphin or adrenaline rush and of course Slack. I think the symptoms are subtle, the behavior is widely accepted as normal and it's destructive in several ways.
So I think it's important to develop a discipline that allows us to exist online safely, productively and in good health. I think what this discipline is is just beginning to emerge in our culture because the problem of digital addiction and being always-on is only beginning to be recognized.
~mark.