Breaking up with Slack

In Slack, I'm Breaking Up With You, Samuel Hulick pens a personal farewell letter to Slack, citing a string of disappointed expectations, mostly time management focused.

His points are certainly genuine and valid however the most important aspect of his perspective is how we expect technology to completely remove the need for social agreement in how we use these technologies. Our disappointment in the way technologies help or hurt us needs to be understood in the context that what makes them work is not there design but our agreements and how we will use them together.

We need  to agree on simple specific things like how often we're expected to visit and respond within these technologies as a team. We need to agree on when and how we use them and when we don't and instead use other media to accomplish our communication and coordination and knowledge sharing. It's in these agreements that make the technology work for us rather than the frustration of feeling like working for the technology.