I Turned Slack Off for a Week. Here’s What Happened.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I recently read Jason Fried’s Medium post on the presence prison, which challenges the reader to “break free” of the green dot and set your presence status to “away” permanently. It sounded so terrifying that I had to do it right away.

Our globally distributed team uses Slack to communicate, and slowly a norm of “coming online” had emerged to show coming to work/being at work. Some of that was fun healthy camaraderie, and I enjoy the hello’s and goodbye’s, but our global spread means almost 24/7, Slack is a hub of activity and people feel they’re missing out on work. This is especially tough on our Asia-Pacific teammates, who end up left out of discussions and conversations, and folks with responsibilities who needed to work different hours and be offline during parts of their workday (like parents!).

Creating a calm, uninterrupted environment is important in an engineering team, but even more important is inclusivity to all our teammates. I was excited about a challenge that could achieve both aims and decided to try a stealthy experiment: I turned my Slack status to “away” permanently for a whole week.

Here’s how my notifications are set up:

I’ve set myself to “Away” and disabled the “do you want to switch back to active?” popup

I’ve turned off all the notifications. I still have the badges within Slack when I open the app.

No sounds, red badges, bouncing, or messages whizzing across my screen

Here’s what happened to me

Well, nothing much! Nobody commented on it, and I haven’t seen anything “bad” happen*. It turns out there wasn’t any real need for people to see a green dot of “I’m here right now!”.

With the green dot always off this week, I’ve felt more relaxed and energized, and I’ve been more productive. The green dot felt to me like an implicit social pressure to respond immediately to messages — if I was clearly online, but not responding right away, it felt like I was ignoring someone. It seemed uncaring, and even rude. I didn’t realize it was also exhausting.

I’m now noticing fewer DMs, and I’m less likely to be pulled into multiple simultaneous conversations (those really drain mental energy!). I feel greater calm and clarity because I single-focus my way through tasks and am 100% present in meetings.

Here’s what I saw happen with my team

Staying connected was surprisingly easy! I open Slack up when I’m intentionally doing communication and chatter. I see all the badges in DMs and Channels, what’s unread, and I can respond, participate in channels and chit-chat completely normally. The dot just stays greyed-out.

I have noticed my team using email and project management tools more and adding things to 1:1 agendas for discussion with me. It’s a bit early still, but this feels like a healthy trend.

I want to create a workplace where everyone feels free be offline and do their thing, and feels confident and safe that their manager and teammates trust them to get on with their work. The trend of important conversations moving to asynchronous tools or to specific scheduled meetings means decisions are more intentional and thoughtful. It’s calmer, there’s less guilt involved, and it’s more inclusive.

So what now?

I still find Slack really useful, and it fulfills a key need in our remote team to stay connected and together. I really enjoyed this take on how tools, culture and the user’s responsibility to use a tool in the most productive way.

I believe the right tweaks and habits can make Slack very healthy and useful. It just takes some work when the habits that further the tool’s own goals (eg “user engagement”) are different to the habits that further the team’s goals.

This is going to be my permanent Slack setup , because whatever I’m doing, it’s the thing I want to be doing and I focus on only that. Sometimes, that thing is Slack. But mostly, it isn’t, and I’m a better leader for it. The next step will be encouraging others to try this out too, and see if this tweak can solve “Slack fatigue” more widely.

If you try this, I’d love to hear how it goes!

Photo by Carolyn V on Unsplash

*I realize that as a director, my role means people are more likely to wait for me to participate rather than go ahead without me and then blame me for not being immediately available. If you’re not a leader and/or your manager and work culture is more “you snooze you loose”, then this advice could backfire. Clap wildly and send them this link instead! 😉