Slack should focus on productivity, not reachability
We are constantly peppered with distractions at work, and tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are a part of the problem.
I’m a software developer, and my average day can be accurately summarised by the following message exchange:
Colleague: Hi Kartik
Me: Hi
Colleague: Plz check my code https://linkto.codereview
Me: Sure I’ll take a look…
While typing out those few words, I always end up thinking about the code they’re writing, trying to remember what it was for, and imagining what it might look like.
And in that time, I entirely forget what I was even working on.
Context switches such as these are distracting. They take you out of your zone, sending every thought that you’ve been holding onto for dear life scattering in a million directions.
There are many articles discussing the impact of consistent context switching on our health and how we can develop better habits to counteract this, but I would like to focus on the role that productivity apps such as Slack and Microsoft Teams play in our daily lives, and how they’re in fact hindering the very thing they seek to improve.
These apps are at their core built for chatting. They are designed to push every single message, be they critical or trivial, to us as quickly as possible. They allow instant communication between everyone, and this is precisely what is keeping us from doing our jobs.
Enter the Digital Personal Assistant
In the same way that senior executives hire personal assistants (or PAs) to help schedule their meetings, handle their emails and messages, and prioritise their tasks, we should be able to deploy digital assistants on our work machines to give us all a helping hand.
The primary objective of such an app would be to intelligently identify what is important to our work. Finishing our work comes first and foremost, but attending team meetings and engaging in discussions are just as important, especially for those of us who spend much of our time working remotely.
So how do we classify what is important and what is not? Regular contact is crucial to ensure teams are aligned but not all emails are critical, and not all instant messages are worth reading as soon as they arrive.
Step 1 — Defining Communication Methods
Today, nearly every company uses email services as standard alongside some sort of instant messaging app, often multiple platforms at once.
Most messages, however, don’t need to be instant. Most emails can be resolved in a 10 minute call, and most company newsletters could probably be written by hand and sent by pigeon without impacting your daily activities.
Here is a good example of an alternative app to Slack which combines email-type messages and instant chat messages into a single communication method, and even automates the creation of conversation threads in order to reduce the noise.
Our digital assistant, however, needs to go one step further. It needs to be able to prioritise incoming messages and make intelligent decisions about which to inform you of, and which to hold onto until you’re actually free to receive them, similar to the role of a PA.
For example, a colleague from another team asks you a question regarding a project you were involved in 2 years ago. This may be important for them to know but it’s not critical to you, not enough to drag you away from your work anyway. So the digital assistant should hold back their message, making an active choice not to disturb you while you’re working. Once you’re done with your current task, you can see the message and respond as you like.
Another example: Your line manager messages you about a new issue that’s cropped up that you need to promptly resolve. Since this directly affects what you should be working on, the digital assistant would immediately push this message to you so that you can deal with it. After all, if your line manager’s contacting you directly (rather than, say, in a group message), it’s probably going to be important.
Prioritising which messages are pushed to you and which are held back for later is a good first step in automating your productivity, but if we want to change the way we work for good, we have to go even further.
Step 2 — Intelligent Scheduling
Let’s say you receive a one-off query. Instead of merely postponing the delivery of this message, wouldn’t it be great if your digital assistant could schedule a meeting later in the day (or on another day if it’s not particularly high in priority)?
We often waste more time typing an explanation (after spending several minutes thinking about the problem at hand) than if we had simply talked it out. By automatically scheduling a dedicated meeting, you don’t have to worry about replying to this person, and when the meeting finally comes around, you’ll be able to focus solely on answering the query rather than trying to juggle multiple tasks at once.
If the digital assistant was responsible for scheduling meetings, they could even prioritise important ones over trivial ones. And if every person had their own digital assistants working for them, then synchronising meetings, or even shuffling them around to make way for higher priority chats, would become effortless.
Step 3 — Clearing Tasks
Of course, you always run the risk that most messages will be classed low priority and thrown to the end of your backlog, which would only grow larger with time.
However, instead of wading into a long list of unread messages (as you do with most current platforms), your digital assistant could help schedule time in your calendar to go through each one in turn.
This is the definition of a true productivity app, one that helps you get through all of your tasks, not just the ones you like doing. And it becomes much easier if you don’t need to spend hours planning how you’re going to tackle your unread message monster. Leave that task to your digital assistant.
Step 4 — Adapting To You
With modern machine learning techniques, it wouldn’t take too long for your digital assistant app to learn your habits, to understand which types of messages, or even which colleagues, you give preference to, and what you leave aside for your backlog, thus improving its own ability to identify important alerts over trivial ones.
In Summary
The apps we use today to aid our productivity inadvertently cause more disruption than they should. The key to staying productive is in being able to intelligently prioritise messages, allowing you to focus on your work when you need to, sending alerts only when necessary.
Productivity apps are there to help you be productive, which usually requires long periods of uninterrupted work. And if your app is constantly interrupting you, it’s not helping you in any way.
Hopefully one day platforms such as Slack and Teams will be replaced with intelligent digital assistants which take a more active role in how we work.
And when it comes to managing our work and our time, we could all benefit from a little assistance.
