Let's Talk About Slack, Baby

She's going to explain to us how it is that an enterprise workplace software affected her life so much she wrote a personal essay about it. But first of all, let's let's get out of the way what group chat is, Becca, you want to give the basic description. Slack is group chat, and just from now on. There are lots of different group chats, but I think we're just going to use Slack a shorthand for all of them, because it's a

really popular, notable one. But yeah, there are others like hip chat and campfire, and all of them basically are just chat rooms where you hang out with your coworkers all day and it's kind of a primary way of communicating with coworkers, and it's work sanctioned, so it's kind of like your work email, but chat right and you can email people one on one, or message people one on one through this app, or talk to them in special rooms that are divided by department or by team,

or by project you're working on, or by anything you make up right, Like you can make a slack room for I don't know, talking about the Real Housewives of Atlanta, Is that a one of those? Yeah, that's that is one of the housewives and probably a really popular slack room. Yeah, i'd say, I don't know what. I don't know how it rates against the other Real Housewives. I mean, it depends on your taste. But you know, a girl, I know, I'm like an O C. I don't watch the Real Housewives. Sure, yeah,

I mean either um so. But anyway, so what we're talking about here, on its face, doesn't sound that unusual or new, right, Like it's chat rooms have been around since basically the dawn of the consumer Internet, Like when the Internet was sort of commercialized in the mid early mid nineties, that's how people communicated on like a O

L chat rooms. Yeah, I think the only thing I did online as a young young kid online was check my email for I don't know what and then go to A O L chat rooms and pretend to be eighteen years old, which is really, how old were you really? I was probably I don't know what. What year do you think this was? Like? So yeah, I was really

I was like six to eight. Wow, you're pretending to Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what that says about, like society, But so yeah, these chat rooms are similar in form to the A O L chat rooms, different and function I would say, So nobody's asking a s L because you know everybody and age, sex location, right a popular query on a L chat rooms. So yeah, they are different than AMIL chat rooms because it's very

work related. I mean, it was made specifically for offices for work, so a lot of the conversations are about work. But then there are also a lot of conversations that aren't about work, which is kind of why it's gotten so popular and my people like using it so much. Right, So, like all of these companies came into this space kind of at a time when the modern office was ripe for a new way of communicating. Would you say, I think the word you're looking for is disruption. No, I

wasn't looking for it, but it found found you. Yeah, I mean, like everyone hates email. It's like a thing people love to hate. H Let's talk about that a little bit, because I feel like the idea of an enterprise workplace chat room feels new or had such room to take off. The way it has is because we've reached a tipping point with how much seem to hate email, which once was supposed to be the solution to all our problems. Right before email, We don't before email. We

just grunted at each other before email. Obviously that we're plugged into walls. Yeah, people spend more and more of their time at work at email. One stat I found was that people spent thirteen hours a week out of their forty hour work week answering emails. It's like, not very fun. That's a shocking number of hours to spend. That's like all of the waking hours in one day. So if you spend five days at work a week,

one of those is consumed by email. Maybe if we had no email at work, we could argue for a four day work week, since we spend a whole day answering email. Maybe, but then how would we communicate with all of our colleagues who work from home or in office is abroad Slack No, But yeah, so email is just I don't think that I have a troubled relationship with email. I again, have that I am not. You're not troubled by not responding to email, right, I guess

I'm rude. I just don't answer emails. I just I use it kind of like how you know, I use it for what I want to use it for. I have a troubled relationship with email, and I also don't answer emails. But then I'm plagued with guilt about it, and that must be hard. Yeah, Slack kind of came along and was like, here's a much more casual way to communicate with your coworkers. The conversations tend to be way more casual. It's a lot easier. There's some fun

integrated into slack. There's like a very simple command for putting in gifts or gifts whatever you prefer is correct, and so that kind of makes the conversations very informal. It replaces a lot of annoying type of email. I think like it doesn't replace email completely, but kind of the annoying like just checking in on something email, which is can be like an annoyance and turn into a

monster very quickly. And then also because it's way more fun than an email, which has kind of become a very formalized form of communication, people really gravitated, right, Like when we talk about it being fun compared to email, I think if you've never never worked on a chat platform at work or on Slack, you might not know what we mean. But it it's sort of like designed in the language of the Internet, Like it's just kind of easier to communicate in the way that you might

normally like send somebody a text or tweet something. In the interfering, it's more like talking. And that's another thing about Slack. It has also in addition to being a sort of email replacement, it's a kind of a meeting replacement, another like much hated part of office life, Like people hate going to pointless meetings where everybody is just kind

of performing. So now you have a lot of these conversations on Slack, So give me a sense of the growth, because we're not now talking about something that's really even that niche anymore. Yeah, no, it It grew from a hundred twenty thousand years years two years ago to like millions of people logging in today. I see tons of people on their phones using slack out and about in New York City all the time. And it isn't just it's not just a couple of industries using it. Now

it's spreading so mainstream right tech media startups. NASA's jet propulsion laboratory is on slack that it's been reported slack slack chapters. Yeah, no slack, I mean slack loves championing this great get for them because it shows like like, this isn't just something for like a bunch of young tech bros. This is something that's useful for office life

of any kind. So it's a real phenomenon. And it came about as a way of solving a lot of the efficients, a lot of the efficiency and communication problems that everybody was having at work. And has it done that? So obviously not. There is a slack lash that has started.

Slacklash being a term that you coined, I believe, so I believe I coined it, and I wrote a piece back in January that was titled You're about to hate Slack as much as you hate email, and just kind of made the point that this communication at work is fraught and stressful and and it's starting to stress people out. I find it very stressful posting in these group platforms

all the time. Like I have a lot of like social anxiety about what I post inside a Slack chat room and like who's responding and who's not, and like I don't really want to have to think about that at work when I have a million other things going on, Like that is a productivity suck. My anxiety is sucking up my productivity. And there's another downside, which is that you can forget because it's so easy to type in a Slack message or a stupid joke that you might

not make in a more polished context. It's easy to forget that everything that you write is on the record and your employer knows about it, and it's going to live forever, even if it feels really temporal. And actually, if you don't believe me, let's listen to an example of kind of the worst case scenario of that, and what is a campfire? Transferred campfire is a chat tool, And then if we go down just giving the middle

sections and entry. I can't be it, says you, guys don't even know how good this whole Cogan shape is f Megan Fox. And then Max Are replies, whole Cogan fuc k is Megan Fox. Sorry, I don't really like to say that. The works on the record, um, and then k WSAs she wishes. He gets really tender at the end, a really tender like drop. Do you know what that's a reference to. It's the extension of a joke about um. The joke is I can manager. Okay.

So what you just heard was the an editor at the website Gawker explaining to a lawyer who appears to have very little sense of humor what he meant and his colleagues meant months or even years earlier, when they were discussing on Campfire, one of these group chat platforms, a sex tape that they were about to release featuring a former professional wrestler, Hulk Hogan. Um. And this is a court case, highly publicized court case, where the Hulk

was suing Gawker for releasing the sex tape. And I don't think any of the people who were making these blue jokes in Campfire ever expected to hear them mentioned again, let alone read aloud in open court by their editor. Yeah, when you I saw. I've read the transcripts of their chats because they're part of evidence, and it's just like

all jokes left and right, jokes. Everybody is just joking about Hulk Coogan's penis and the tender leg drop joke, and yeah, using a lot of slang, and it's very clear that, I mean, for most people, this wouldn't even

look like an appropriate workplace conversation, right. I think Gawker is kind of known for an edgy or style, and I think probably even in the newsroom it's employees speak a little more freely than some others, and this is like obviously like the most casual form of their communications. And like you said, there's no way they thought they'd

ever see those again. I think in these chat platforms, you feel like it's like disappears once you type it, like because it's like literally a feed that like scrolls up,

it's gone, but it's obviously not. Yes, you are supposed to never I've been told by lawyers, never type in anything, type or write anything you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times, which I feel like it's a bit of a dated like guidelines, like maybe it's on the front page of Gawker or like a viral tweet, like, but that's the thing, Like it seems like we have to relearn this with every new technology. Like most people are pretty savvy about incorporating that advice

when it comes to sending an email. You wouldn't. If you have to have a conversation that's kind of sensitive, you know, you should probably have it over the phone or in person and not over email. But for some reason, because lack is new, because it feels kind of off the grid or fun or social, people just don't have the same relationship to it that they do with email. Yeah, email used to be fun when it first entered offices,

people gossipped and made jokes. And then when I think people started getting in trouble for these things and it became more like formalized in the workplace, it became this more formal, boring, strictly work related tool. Part of why we hate it so much. And but slack is so

new and that behaviors seems so casual. It's like something has to have been publicly subpoenaed in a hundred court cases before, Like we've all heard of court cases that feature email transcripts, and our presidential campaign, one of the main issues swirling around that is Hillary Clinton's emails and

what they say and to whom they were sent. And you know the idea that I mean, yes, of course people keep making mistakes on emails, but it's like, this is the first example of the sort of clinical examination of a group chat, of the campfire transcript that we're kind of used to seeing. This is the first high profile example of that kind of treatment of a group chat transcript. Then, you know, with government agencies now starting to use slack like their stuff can be foiad this

is it's work, it's work chat. But all of us are so guilty. You know, it's like we're talking to our friends, right, And that kind of confusion between how to treat slack, whether it's a work thing or a personal thing, is something that is very much on the mind of our guest. So I think it's a great time to introduce her. Dana Evans. She's a writer for New York Magazine, and back in January she wrote an article called are my Coworkers slacking off without me, Dana,

We're very happy to have you here. What do you think of how we described slack? Did we basically get it right? Yeah? I mean I think that that really covers it. That's the basis of the article is like it makes work seem fun, which I think is good and bad. What is your current relationship status with slack? I'd say it's complicated. I try now, I think for

a while. You know, I started New York Magazine almost a year ago now, and I think that when you first start, it's sort of a process of like getting to know how a company uses it and feeling comfortable because it's I think it varies at every place that you work, so it's kind of like knowing what the

company politics are. And I think now our slack channel, especially at the Cut, which is where I work at New York Magazine, we have kind of two separate channels, one specifically for like very straightforward work stuff, and then a second one that is only fun. So it's kind of like knowing where to balance, Like you know how much time you spend in the fund slack and how much time you spend in the work slack, and also how much time you spend completely away from it, which

I think is really valuable. Do you feel like group chat reveals kind of the people who are having a little bit too m fun Like just like there's a person who like spends too much time hanging out talking to people, there's like probably the person who spends way too much time in the fun cut. Yeah. Absolutely, I think that that's that's like what's funny about it though, because I think it also varies like over you know,

it changes over time. There's definitely always going to be the person who like is really good at multitasking and can be slacking all day and also working or that's what you think is going on anyway. But and then there's the people who never come into the conversation at all. But there's always the one person who's just like does this person do anything oday at all? Or they just like constantly talking, So how how are you splitting your time? Like?

What how are you using slack for me? I think, especially my old job, I was really adamant about having one day where I didn't go into slack at all because I feel like, especially in writing, it's so distracting to constantly having notifications coming up and now I kind of I'm a little bit more like self monitoring. So I try to have you know, mornings off from it if I can possibly, like if I can you know,

focus on writing stuff. But in general, I keep it minimized, and my notifications aren't like you know, they don't pop up. It's so it's like I have to actually go in and check it to see if something is you know, happening.

But in terms of like the fun stuff, it's hard to say, like some days you just wake up and you really don't feel like being a productive person, I guess, and it's so easy to just kind of give into the the available fun chat, I guess, And so on those days, I try to like remember it, this is also a job, and I have to actually do things for my job. So yeah, it's interesting that you bring up that you have to monitor your slack behavior because we've been talking about how much people love slack, but

those obviously this darker side. And again it's almost as if Slack has made our work lives a little bit more complicated, like there's now just like another way to communicate with people. And before we get into some of those more complicated feelings on Slack. We're going to hear from some other office workers about their feelings with office chat. Slack sucks. I love slack, but I also hate slack.

I'm distracted a lot by it. I enjoy using Slack, it might actually encourage negative vices for me, So it can be a little bit distracting at times because you kind of want to be able to catch up on every single channel, but you generally can't if you're busy

working on projects. Like when you're in a Slack group, everything is very instant, which I feel like I'm part of a conversation as opposed to an email thread that kind of will come out of order or it will not reply to the most recent one, but are applied

to four behind. So you're kind of pulling together threads of information from different threads of emails when there was just too many notifications and being part of too many channels and setting those notications to like always notified me no matter what a So let's talk a little bit

more about what slack fomo is exactly. Can you define it a bit for us, Dana, Yeah, I think because like I said, like slack makes work seem fun on days off, or like like I said, I have these days where I tried to really bunker down and focus on one piece and not being slack at all. You sort of miss the goofy conversations you're having with your coworkers.

Even if you're not particularly close with your coworkers. It's just fun to like be talking about personal stuff that you probably would never actually broached with a lot of people that you work with. So it's kind of like the fomo aspect comes in when you realize, oh, like I took the afternoon off and maybe Beyonce's record came out or whatever it is like that you would normally be talking about, and it's like you weren't there for any of that conversation, and you feel kind of like, oh,

my friends had a really fun day. I wasn't there for it, even though it's literally work and that's essentibly what the product is for. Do you think you're kind of upset about missing out because part of having fun at work is part of my job. Job? Yeah, I think slack makes you a little bit delusional about what

work is. And I think that inevitably, you know you're supposed to be using this tool for productivity, but Oftentimes I find myself in these conversations where it's like we're having so much fun talking about this thing that like no work happens for like an hour. And I think that that is the thing that you end up missing because you're maybe you're gone to do actual work. You're right in your piece. Slack, on the other hand, makes a simple d M from your boss at nine pm

and others to seem less threatening. Oh I'll just answer her question now, you think so she believes I'm still at this party though I left a long time ago for a different, better one. The different better party is subsequently your real life exactly. I mean, I've just it's so hard for me to imagine any other context where we would talk about work, where we would use a

party as a metaphor for work. Right, yeah, absolutely, But I think that even that, like the sort of the d M aspect of it, and hearing from your editors and your bosses all the time, I think is like it really it makes everything seems so normalized, like, oh, yeah, of course I would respond to this thing, and like I said, you know, nine pm or whatever, But you forget that this is an actual work transaction that's happening, and and sometimes that like, you know, when I do

get dms like that, maybe I'm at a bar, maybe i'm you know, I'm doing something that like probably I should take some time to think about responding before I

just shoot something off. But I think it's it makes everything so casual that it seems like, oh, it's not a big deal to respond to how I wanted, So you'd be less likely to send an email to your boss from a bar thing, Yeah, exactly right, because it just seems so impersonal just to be like, oh, this is you know, chat, I'm just talking to her as if I'm talking to in person. But it seems like you you, even though you know it's wrong, at that d M at nine pm, you seem to be okay

with it in some ways. But there are some people who I think are a little bit angry about that, and there's been a little bit of a slack lash building In the last six months. There have been a bunch of articles people talking about notification overload that actually it's worse than email because you can send these messages all the time, all day. But you seem to have a pretty good relationship, a good balance, I would say

I try. I don't know if I definitely adhere to the things that I'm saying that I actually take time away from it. But I think, you know, especially with this sort of like all day aspect, it really makes you feel like you work twenty four hours a day and you're sort of available twenty four hours a day. And I think actually remembering because I think I'm self limiting because I know I have terrible a d D. And like, if I actually pay attention to those notifications

all day, I will get nothing done. So it's I think the way I manage it is being able to have a block of time where I know that I'm not allowed even to say anything in slack work or not work. Yeah, that's really impressive. Thank you. So to get to the bottom of all this, Dana slack, is it the end of productivity at work? Or is it the answer to all our problems? That's I feel like

we're not there yet. I think that what will happen at least in the next year or so, as as you know it grows astronomically as it had is people will really start to figure are out how do you

slack to their advantage? Whereas right now it's stick total free for all I feel, and I think that companies are going to start doing, you know, with the Gawker Hogan trial, it was like, oh, this is actually we need to be thinking about how we're using this this platform, and I think it will start to get to a point where there's going to be a lot more slimming

down of how we use it. We'll still use it as a chat platform, and it will allow us to to speak more freely with our coworkers, but I think in a way that is a little bit more professional. I guess if that's the right word to use. I don't even know if you can use that word with Slack, but feeling like it's a place where it's actually aiding us as opposed to setting us back, that's that's a

good point. We tend to blame technology for all of our work problems and productivity issues, but like, we really need to figure out how to use these things to our advantage. And you know, even Slack recognizes that it has a long way to go and released this winter. I do not disturb feature so that when people shouldn't be on Slack, or when they don't really want to

be on slack. They can just kind of turn it off and not get the notifications, which is just like one tiny step towards like not being connected all the time. So slack is recognizing human nature. We're basically always going to find a way to goof off if there is one. Amen, Thanks for talking to us about slack, Dana. Before we go, we're gonna dig into the archives. Here's an excerpt from an article. The manager is hunched over his terminal, squinting

at the screen. Then comes a little chuckle, a rapid fire series of key strokes. He hits the sent button and the scene is repeated by another manager across the room. The exchange is quick and utterly invisible. It is part of a system that is quietly damaging many corporate enterprises from within. Well, that is clearly an article about group chat within the past year or so, right, So those articles from the Washington Post, and the writer is talking

about the problem he talks about is instantaneous email. It's a great time waster, after all, he says, it is fun to share secrets, tell jokes, flirt, complain about fellow workers Peckett Dillows, especially if you can't get caught, which is just exactly what people do on grip chat now. But it's really great to see how people thought about email when it first came out. People obviously workers thought

it was fun. Probably the biggest difference is that that last bit, especially if you can't get caught, the lack of awareness of people probably had about how easy it was to, you know, or would become for your employer to peek in at what you're doing, or for you know, opposing counsel to depose the records of what you said.

I wonder what kind of crazy things were said if there really were an atmosphere where people thought, like, no one has any way of knowing what I said in this email, where even now, like there's some voice in the back of our head when we're typing some totally not work appropriate thing into slack that's telling us someone could probably read this. But even it's kind of like this guy says, emails ruining the office, but none of

us could live our work lives at every right. Well, I wonder maybe this is naive, But what what was it like before email then? Like what would you do just talk in person the entire time? And I mean I think work got done within a much smaller sphere. I think that. I mean, it's a conversation about globalization and everything else, but you just worked with a smaller group of people. You work with the people who are around you, you either talk to them in person or

you you know, made a long distance phone call. Yeah. And some of the other old articles I was looking at they talk about phones the way we now talk about email, where like the phone was work life but now you know we rarely pick up the phone and hate email, and slack is the future. Why can't you just slack me the answer to my simple question? Yeah? Great, Well,

thank you so much for joining us today on game Plan. Dana, thank you for and you guys can read more of our work life coverage over at Bloomberg dot com and check us out on Twitter. I'm at rs Greenfield, I'm at Francesca today and Dana is at Dana d A y n A Evans Underscore. See you next week. Oh okay, g fun times USA. Ready, Okay,