2017 is filled with articles about Slack. Some believe that Slack is changing the communication and collaboration landscape, and is effectively the current big thing. While others think it is too much of a hyped thing and still stick to oldschool ways of communicating.

Larger corprations clearly see Slack as a great competitor, and therefore are coming up with alternatives. Microsoft launches Skype Teams, Google launches Google Meet, Atlassian has Hipchat.

So, is Slack the productivity killer? Is it really that distracting? Is Slack better than email?

Why Slack is good

Slack indeed is a great replacement for a team chat. Those who used Skype for large group chats for work would really understand me. Messaging is instanteneous, things sync across devices momentarily, and of course, integrations!!

We’re using:

  • Jira bot so that all ticket changes from all projects are seen in relevant channels;
  • Bamboo bot so that statuses of all builds are seen in relevant channels;
  • Bitbucket bot so that commits for all projects are visible in relevant channels;
  • Our own proprietary bot so that we can manage builds and environment by text commands rather than accessing Bamboo from under VPN;
  • Zendesk bot to receive statuses of tickets from clients;
  • All other kinds of smaller things to just have fun some time.

Why Slack is bad

Because, obviously, it is a lot of notifications all the time. And notifications are bad. That’s why, for example, I do not have notifications in my email clients at all.

How to fix it

So the easy way to fix the above problem is just mute all channels, where information is not mission critical. Mostof our automated channels where those bots are writing are muted.