Slack is a wonderful communication tool, I love how easy it is to get in touch with my co-workers, but it is also a huge time suck which I have become slightly addicted to. It is way to easy to start browsing through a channel, start checking on the pinned items (#living-vicariously, I’m looking at you), and then look up and realize that you have lost a hour of the prime working hours. When I first started my current position, I was so excited to have Slack. It was absolutely verboden at my previous workplace, and my one experience was using it at a hackathon just for about 24 hours. It was so shiny, and packed to the brim with emoji’s, gifs and fun times. Share your screen! Message! Share! For a while, I even had my laptop screen open with just Slack on that screen. You only have so much attention and concentration to spread around, and my brain power was getting sucked into Slack channels. I even had a couple weird Slack related dreams, and that is when you know you are spending waaaaaay to much time on it. It even felt a bit Circle to me at times, I related to a lot of parts of that book.
Now my getting down to business routine involves fully closing slack, muting other notifications, closing all unneeded chrome taps, and then putting in the headphones. How do you focus? Is Slack a time suck for others or is it just me. Might just be my fear of missing out (FOMO) coming into play here too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯