Breaking up with Slack

This article is about my experience of removing my work’s slack from my personal phone. 🎊

Slack was the best and worst part of my day. It helped me communicate with my coworkers, yet kept me from getting any actual work done. It helped me feel important, yet kept me from doing my important work.

I was a hardcore addict of Slack. I’d have it open on my laptop all day long, just waiting for someone to say anything. I mean I would not want to be that loser coworker who is the only one in the office not giggling. Nothing worse than being left out of a department wide joke. Plus I need to respond to these jokes quickly before someone else steals my not so clever joke to get some floor wide laughter.

I would read articles about how bad slack is, how it affects productivity and leads to burn out. I’d have urges to delete it, but I always came up with several good reasons to keep it. Well one good reason and a lots of other reasons that felt like they made my life better.

Even though I’d hate the time I’d be away from slack (like when I was sleeping), I was always excited to see how many messages I had missed. Like it was a freaking contest or something. The more messages I had missed the more important I felt. And the real problem here is I not only felt important to my company, but also in my life. At one point I’m ashamed to admit, I felt like my self worth was tightly coupled with the number of slack message I’d get in a day. Let me restate that. My self worth increased with every slack message I received. THIS IS VERY BAD.

If I got less messages than I thought I should have received I would be down on my self. A stupid red bubble was dictating my happiness in life. This belief eventually led to burnout.

After several weeks of showing up late, leaving early, not being very productive and being a real negative Nancy, I finally deleted slack (I also deleted work email and my work calendar). I needed a break from the chaos, I needed times to decompress and not react to everything the second it happens. I needed time to think and process. I needed to stop thinking I was a hero and realize we had a whole department of very capable developers who were frankly smarter than me.

The first couple days were actually not that great. I would catch my self pulling my phone out to get that dopamine hit only to be disappointed. Eventually I realized I got my evenings and weekends back. I also got my lunch back, my bathroom breaks and my commute back.

With all this time to just think and not react, my whole mindset and relationship with my work changed. I no longer hated going in! THIS IS GOOD!!!!!

My general feeling of negative nanciness went away, I started being productive again and my self worth was not tied to the red bubbles! I will admit I was excited about going in to work in the mornings because I knew I’d have a whole slew of messages waiting for me. (once an addict always an addict).

Luckily I work at an amazing company that is always trying to help its’ people.

Weave has always been improving and getting better. Some of the processes that were introduced allowed me to delete slack off my phone. We implemented an alerting system so we didn’t have to rely on slack to know if things were broken. Reason #1 for keeping slack was no longer valid. Thank you dev-ops team! And thank you to my coworkers who were patient with me through my slump of bad attitude.

I hope this inspires you to break up with slack too!

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