140 Mins per Work Day ... How Slack hooks users through artificial urgency

[nelsonic]

http://jshakespeare.com/how-slack-hooks-users-through-artificial-urgency

[nelsonic]

In case the post goes offline ...
How-Slack-hooks-users-through-artificial-urgency.pdf

[Cleop]

Summary notes:

• The average slack user spends 140 minutes per weekday on the platform (four times more than Facebook’s 35 minutes per day).

• People are lured in by 'its ability to manufacture an artificial sense of urgency'.

There’s no option to send a message ... in a way that says ‘no need to stop what you’re doing, but could you please deal with this at some point?’.

The two devices it uses to manufacture urgency are:

• Eyeball-grabbing, shouty notifications (like those on social media)
• The fact that it's impossible to distinguish emergency from inconsequential chatter: 'every message is presented as time-sensitive, and sometimes those messages are genuinely important'

The Slack message from your boss saying ‘the website has been hacked and everything is on fire’ looks and sounds identical to the message from the person sitting next to you asking where you want to go for lunch.

FOMO: Slack chatter can be ephemeral and hard to revisit, so you feel compelled to continually check in throughout the day in case you miss out on something important.

Slack encourages us to juggle hundreds of separate conversations, barraging our colleagues with stream-of-consciousness messages and giving little regard to what the recipient is currently doing.