James Koole

Back at the start of the pandemic in early 2020, I made the decision to more clearly delineate between my work and personal lives. Working from home made it far too easy to be “working” all the time.

One of the first things I did was to “personalize” my iPhone. I don’t mean adding a wallpaper and rearranging my app icons. I deleted and removed anything that was work-related from my personal phone.

That meant signing out of my work Slack, removing my work email, getting rid of the VPN app and removing all other apps that were only there in case I needed them to work. I signed out of my work 1Password account and Google Workspace (or whatever they call it these days).

My phone is now only used for personal communications and not for work. If my co-workers need to reach me after hours (which is pretty rare), they send me an SMS message and I log into my work MacBook Pro to handle whatever needs handling.

Personalized Computer

Speaking of that MacBook Pro, I also purchased my own MacBook Air (the 2020 M1 model) in late 2020 and removed anything personal from my work computer and never installed anything work-related on my personal computer. I’m fortunate that I can afford to have a nice personal computer.

The only work “crutch” I have on my personal computer is that I can remote into my work MacBook Pro if I can’t be bothered to go down to my basement office. Other than that, it’s completely free of work. In fact, if I’m out of the house and not connected to my home network, I can’t remote in.

It’s a privilege to have the work-life balance I get with my employer. I get that some are on-call or have different needs when it comes to their jobs. But for me, separating out my work from personal life on my computing devices has been an important part of staying sane as we navigate the pandemic and all that comes along with it.

I honestly don’t think Slack is solving anything as compared to email, and in a lot of cases, it’s quite simply making things worse.

As a longtime Slack user (early beta), I started out loving Slack. Now, after a year of using it while working remotely due to the pandemic? I kind of hate it.

Slack as an application is fine. It works well and looks nice. It generally doesn’t get in my way to do what it is supposed to do. I can type messages, read various channels and generally communicate with others in our company.

Where it falls apart badly is that it doesn’t do much of anything to prevent the things that used to really frustrate me when I was working in the office.

The Drive-By

Specifically I’m talking about the drive-by interruption where I would be sitting at my desk, with headphones on to signal that I am actively in the process of work. Someone would invariably interrupt me, breaking me out of that context and into a conversation (usually trivial).

This is quite literally almost 100% of my Slack. It’s honestly just a series of interruptions to my work day, the vast majority of which are ill-timed, unimportant and counterproductive.

I’ve tried many things to solve this. Status icons? They don’t work. People just ignore that you are in a meeting 📅, or have a DND ⛔️ icon or even a 🏝️ to denote that you are ON VACATION. “Hey, question for you…got a sec?” Well, I do now since you just interrupted what I was working on.

Even setting DND in our company makes no difference. People will get the message that I’ve set my Slack to do not disturb, and they break through it and notify me anyways. Seriously.

What’s the solution?

The only solution that I’ve found that actually works is to turn off Slack. I close the app. Since I don’t run Slack on my phone (that’s a whole separate topic), closing the app on my computer means I’m unreachable and uninterruptible.

Obviously that’s a terrible solution as it means I’m unreachable and uninterruptible so if someone on my team actually needs me, they can’t reach me. But it’s the only solution that works because the times that I need to be reached by my team are rarer than the times that the opposite happens and someone interrupts my work for no good reason and my team knows how to reach me off Slack when needed.

The Real Fix

The fix for all this is not to adopt a new tool or app, but rather to invoke a cultural change at work. We need to transition from an expectation of real time, synchronous communication to an expectation of non-real time, asynchronous communication. At the very least, there needs to be some way to reliably signal that a user is open to interruption or real time communication and coworkers should be actively prevented from misusing the tools to interrupt work.

Adopting that cultural change will make it clear to everyone that Slack (and other “work” tools”) suck. It will drive change.

Some feature ideas for Slack

Since Slack does have the ability to drive some of the change from their side, here’s a few “free” ideas for them.

• Send when available: User A can mark themselves unavailable for a time. User B can send a message to User A, but it’s only actually delivered when User A marks themselves available again. User B is told this will happen so they aren’t expecting an immediate response.
• Offline for most: User A can set themselves as “away” for everyone except a selection of users they choose. For example, User A could be “away” for everyone in the company except their team or manager.
• Focus mode: User A can choose a few important channels, and when activating “focus mode” the rest of the channels they are part of are hidden and muted.

My job went full remote on March 9, 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread around the globe. I had hit the office over the weekend when the email went around to all staff and I grabbed a couple of monitors and my keyboard, mouse and laptop stand to help get a good setup in my basement office.

We had travel planned for the week following that, so after four days working from home, we drove south for nine days. On our return, the real work from home experience began. A part of my team has always worked remotely for some of the week, so the transition to 100% remote went really smoothly. We already used Slack extensively and our Google accounts were upgraded to Enterprise giving us the ability to host Meet calls with hundreds of people.

A couple of weeks in we on-boarded a new developer who I had only met once during the interview process. She was the last non-employee in our building the Friday prior to our offices closing down. That all went great with the company shipping out a configured laptop to her. She was coming from a full-remote position at another company so for her, the transition was smooth.

A couple of months into our new work from anywhere lifestyle, here’s a few pros and cons that I’ve put together based on my experience.

Pros

• Sleeping in. I used to be up at 6:00 A.M. and out the door at about 7:10 A.M. to catch my train into the office. Now, I wake up without an alarm and roll out of bed around 7:30 A.M. while still starting work at 8:00 A.M. as before.
• Lunch runs. To be able to get in 8-10km of running on my lunch hour is a real treat. After work time: I finish up most days by about 4:30 P.M. which means ample time to get out to run an errand or go grocery shopping before dinner.

Cons

• A non-empty house. my wife works from home upstairs and our two high-schoolers are doing school from home as well. That’s a lot of people around the house all the time and it’s sometimes distracting.
• No social time. I miss the idle chit-chat, coffee runs, impromptu conversations and the other social aspects of office life. We’ve replaced some of that with more Meets and Slack calls, but it’s not the same.
• Cold feet. being in the basement all day, especially in March and early April was sometimes tough. It’s not exactly warm down here and so a space heater and a blanket was sometimes required to stay comfortable.

Final Thoughts

Overall, it’s been more positive than negative. I do enjoy the time away from work on the weekends and I’ve set some boundaries to resist the urge to sit down and work on Saturday or in the evenings. Shutting down Slack and email and turning off notifications during off hours really helps with that. Keeping the daily routine of a specific start time and end time also helps in ensuring that work and non-work time is clearly defined.

I suspect we’ll be working from home for quite some time still and there’s always the possibility that I never go back to the office. I’ve long dreamed of moving out west to Vancouver, and so maybe this new remote work reality will finally make that at least somewhat possible.