Slack With Care

At work, when we can’t find an answer ourselves, we ask questions on Slack because it’s convenient. We believe the audience has the answer. The asker reaps the benefit while the person who answered gets distracted.

When I've written a lengthy detailed answer, I get a sense of accomplishment in the moment, but does that effort scale long-term? My answers are usually out of sight within a couple of days. When answering questions on Slack, I tend to type in the order that the information comes to mind, usually without the luxury of deep thought. This is because I get a sense of urgency and immediacy when asked a question in chat. The more I do this on Slack, the more it feels like I’m getting diminishing returns.

Remote asynchronous communication at work has been the norm for some time. Many workers are now comfortable with “live messaging” that it’s hard to imagine work without it. This comfort can lead to problems, stemming from how much information we share on Slack.

Beware Ephemeral Messaging

Perhaps the biggest issue I've faced with chat itself is that messages are somewhat ephemeral because they live on a timeline, not a folder structure. Scrolling up to read messages I missed out on happens on a daily basis. I consume it all in bulk, perhaps in the wrong order, and I struggle to focus on what was important. Some days I click through channels just to clear the bold unread titles.

Private channels, direct messages and group chats are another place where good content can be forgotten. These channels are often renamed or destroyed. People are added and removed. It's easy to lose track of what context was in there and whether it would be important to somebody else in the future.

If you ever need to find important messages again, you’ll have to search. If you're lucky and those channels and messages still exist and remain open to you, will usually result in a mishmash of messages from different people, times, and degrees of relevance to what you were searching for.

Document, Document, Document

Documenting consistently will eventually protect your time and focus while helping your company be more resilient, ensuring “know-how” doesn’t become “don’t know” if you change teams or leave the company.

You can ensure your answers continue to deliver value long after they're written through documentation and linking to that. This approach applies to day-to-day work questions. Think back to times when you’ve been asked, “How does x work?” or “Why does y work this way?”. Questions that demand a long form answer. If you’ve worked on anything extensively, you’ll come to know things others will want to understand at a later date.

Chances are, your company already uses a documentation tool like Confluence. Get comfortable with it. Writing with deeper thought benefits both you and your readers. That’s “readers” plural because any written content can be consumed by many.

It takes time and focus to write documentation, but the difference is, you can plan and write when it’s most convenient for you.

A post on Confluence doesn't have to be a well-put-together document with images and fancy formatting either. Capturing important context with a sprinkle of relevant keywords is enough to ensure somebody else can find it. Whenever an important decision is made, or when you have to explain how something works is worthy of Confluence in my opinion.

Success indicators can be hard to notice. The less time you spend directly answering repeat questions, the better. You can track views on pages you’ve written in Confluence – the higher the number, the better. If you find your colleagues’ documentation helpful, add a reaction or leave a comment. Make success indicators plain for the writer and everyone else to see. This fosters a culture of writing and sharing information on Confluence. The goal is to make Confluence the primary search destination and ensure it delivers the best results.

Be A Note Taker

Build your own knowledge base one step at a time. Extract important context from Slack as soon as it happens into your private notes. Over time, you might accumulate enough context about a single topic to make it worthy of a Confluence page.

The beauty of a remote meeting is the ability to take notes without distracting or disturbing the speaker. It’s important to give your full attention too, but there’s a skill in listening while taking bullet points. I like to expand on those points as soon as the call is over so I can offload important information while it’s fresh in mind. This lets me mentally park the topic and frees me up to focus on the next task.

I use Apple Notes to quickly jot down bullet points because it’s pre-installed on my work machine and easy to use. It has some advanced features, but I treat it like post-it notes. I don’t intend to keep them forever. If you feel your notes can be useful to others, rework the structure of the note and create some documentation out of it. You can invite others who were on the call to add their perspective too. They might have picked up on something you missed or correct a misunderstanding.

Don’t Bury Context

Throughout the day, an active organisation generates new ideas, makes decisions, and shares important context through conversations on Slack. It’s hard to fathom how much information gets siloed and lost to the ephemeral scroll-wheel of time. While not all information is worth sharing, critical insights and valuable knowledge can easily be buried and forgotten without proper documentation.

Sometimes, I struggle to pause and think before responding. Other times, I add important context to threads, private channels, and direct messages without later extracting it into a note. That’s why I’m challenging myself to change, hoping to:

1. Improve my writing skills.
2. Clarify the topic for myself and others.
3. Create a space for everyone to access and share information on a particular topic.
4. Foster an environment where capturing important context in documentation is standard practice.

I hope this post encourages you to balance the immediacy of Slack with the lasting value of proper documentation. Being mindful of how we communicate and documenting important information, we can make everyone more productive, reduce disruptions, and create a more resilient organization.