How to Get Rid of Weakness After Work
If your company communicates via Slack, you know the intoxicating charm of a giant work chat where you can create entire rooms dedicated to things like Riverdale and skincare. And then you need to talk about real work stuff. It can really eat the day! This is how you do not swallow even the night.
Remove Slack from your phone (or minimize notifications)
One of the reasons this kind of communication follows us home is because notifications are sent to our phone. Are they important? Does someone need to contact us? Or is KJ Apa just posting a new Instagram on the NYC subway and someone is crazy about the @here tag? Those little red numbers indicating a hot new topic are extremely tempting, even if you’ve vowed not to watch the app after 6pm.
Leah Fessler of Quartz writes that she’s having a hard time putting off work overnight, but she was inspired by former Slack senior engineer Erica Joy Baker. Baker spoke at the Wall Street Journal’s Women in the Workplace conference in San Francisco, explaining how she resisted the siren sound that came from herself.
“I don’t have a working Slack on my phone because when I go home I want people to have a hard time contacting me,” Baker explained. If you’ve already set the option that you won’t be watching in Slack after a certain amount of time, remove it from your phone. Then you won’t look at all!
If you really think that permanent deletion is not possible (and you actually tried it), you might consider deleting it at the end of a business day and re-downloading it in the morning. Extra work, but for your sanity’s sake, this might be a workaround. You can also limit notifications and snooze all Slack channels. Try making this part of your leaving work routine and see if it reduces noise during dinner.
Make them call you
But there are also emergencies, you argue. What if someone really needs to talk to you? In this case, Baker says her team was asked to call her.
“That’s why I tell my employees that when I leave the office, if something goes wrong and you need me, you can call me. I have never been called yet, so everything will be fine. “
This is kind of a catch because, as Baker admits, we are the generation of people who are uncomfortable talking on the phone. Please note, she says that you call, do not write . This means that no one will call unless absolutely necessary. Of course, Baker is the boss. Not everyone will be able to set this option.
Leaving Slack as an employee can be difficult because it means setting boundaries with someone who has power over you. However, constant checking when there is no explicit demand on you means that you are blurring those boundaries.
Snooze notifications
Unless your boss has asked you to check Slack when you’re not on watch, make it a habit that you are unavailable until the next morning on the workday. CEO Saman Rahmanyan told Fast Company that his company’s Slack best practices are based on the idea that you don’t want to be sucked into side chats. This is both after work and during work, when you mess around instead of being productive:
“Leave all the channels that you absolutely don’t need to be in, and turn off all notifications that you have not personally mentioned. If you absolutely need to concentrate for a while, say goodbye to Slack by hitting command + Q. “
It can also be related to how the rooms are organized in your company, which may also be beyond your control. Try to resist unnecessary threads that you don’t need to be in; you can also snooze notifications for every room except the most important ones, or allow only direct messages to be accessed. Or write an absence message, add a red circle with a forward slash emoji next to your name – whatever to remind your coworkers that Slack is a communication tool, not a direct line of communication with your brain. This is how you separate your Slack chats from your Slack work.