Curing Our Slack Addiction
This is incredibly timely for me. We have grown from a team of 2 to a team of 18 in the past year, we&#x27;re all remote and we literally huddle around Slack and warm ourselves to it&#x27;s glow from morning till night. It&#x27;s the core of our company culture and our comms.<p>I think Dave (the author and founder of 1password) is feeling the same thing I&#x27;m feeling as a CEO. It&#x27;s a kind of weird anxiety that creeps up on you as the company scales and you feel like you&#x27;re always-on from the moment you open your eyes to the moment you close them at night. I think it&#x27;s a symptom of a virtual office and team. A real office on the other hand would provide that very real sense of driving home in the evening that gives you a very solid separation from work, the team, the opportunities and the issues.<p>To be clear: I&#x27;ll never go back to a physical office, both for my own benefit and that of my team&#x27;s.<p>I became aware of this problem with being always-on recently. I also started giving rather short unvarnished answers to questions on Slack and I realized something had changed. I&#x27;ve put it down to having no sense of quiet time. I don&#x27;t mean not having any &#x27;quiet time&#x27; but having no &#x27;sense of quiet time&#x27; because someone might have messaged me. So even if I set myself to away, I&#x27;m still checking in just in case I dropped the ball because someone is waiting for a reply.<p>I&#x27;ve changed two things so far to try and fix this:<p>- Taking long walks (in addition to my regular bike rides) with Slack off. 
- I still code, so I turn Slack off and set my alarm for 1.5 hours from now or whenever I need to be back on. Then turn Slack off.<p>Things I&#x27;m considering:<p>- Banning Slack after a certain time at night (for me personally). Perhaps 8pm. 
- Banning Slack for myself until I&#x27;m &quot;on&quot; in the mornings.<p>Being a remote team I see Slack as absolutely essential and I don&#x27;t think we could do without it. We are very productive via slack and we share music, jokes, news, ideas for blog posts and many other things via Slack. We also do our voice calls via Slack and we don&#x27;t use video on purpose because it&#x27;s distracting. So for us, Slack won&#x27;t go away any time soon. I think if you can manage it, it&#x27;s an amazing team platform.<p>On a broader note: I think digital addiction is a real problem. I think it&#x27;s subtle and it involves checking the same thing more than 20 times a day in a non-productive obsessive way. Think Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, hitting refresh on a SaaS thing that gives you a quick endorphin or adrenaline rush and of course Slack. I think the symptoms are subtle, the behavior is widely accepted as normal and it&#x27;s destructive in several ways.<p>So I think it&#x27;s important to develop a discipline that allows us to exist online safely, productively and in good health. I think what this discipline is is just beginning to emerge in our culture because the problem of digital addiction and being always-on is only beginning to be recognized.<p>~mark.