Does @SlackHQ stress you out? Ask if you REALLY need to be on it so much.

In case it's unclear, ask your manager whether you're expected to monitor Slack, which rooms, what response time, etc. You might be surprised to find they don't want you stressing about it all day, either.

A nonzero number of you had a productive start to your week this morning, then checked Slack, saw a discussion about a high-stakes issue, felt your heart rate increase, then left Slack feeling frazzled, worried, or upset. And that's without having participated in the discussion!

Important conversations need to happen at work, but Slack is usually the wrong place for them if your goal is problem solving and not merely catharsis. Just like Twitter, negative and cynical takes generate more engagement than positive ones and few people seem to recognize this.

10 years ago, I remember feeling twice as productive working remote; colocated, one person's negativity could bring the whole room down. But Slack has leapfrogged offices' ability to spread negativity because its room size is limitless and there's a bias of who talks vs who reads

I'm not saying to feign positivity or to shy away from hard conversations. I'm saying the emotional toll Slack has on people is real, it's high, and it's unaccounted for when starting a discussion. We should all be cognizant of the splash damage of our words and actions on others

When someone takes a strong position on Slack, others often feel little room for disagreement. If someone reads something on Slack and it causes their blood pressure to spike, the most likely reaction isn't a healthy conversation: it's silence. Stressed out, disengaging silence.

And when a wrong-and-strong take goes unchallenged for that very reason, it reverberates: other readers who come along may interpret the lack of any dissent as a tacit endorsement by peers and managers. "Guess that's the company position, then", even if it's an unpopular opinion

And all of the above is assuming that the people who disagree or feel hurt don't engage! For lots of teams, the same chat room that shares company announcements, cat gifs, and server status updates can double as a minefield of extemporaneous heated arguments that never end.

This is why my advice is to establish explicit expectations about Slack. If your manager expects you to respond to notifications within 5 minutes for operational reasons, then it's fair to ask that a channel be separated from other discussions that would be better left as opt-in.

Anyway, it's a bummer that Slack has become yet another success story in taking something great about the Internet (distributed, focused remote work) and locking people into a platform that (unless it's very well-moderated) reinforces some of the worst things about office work.