Slack and Teams Waste Your Time

My job is to help CEOs and leadership teams scale their companies. And one of the things that I see that is one of the biggest waste of time is how we use Slack and teams. Now, can these tools be useful and powerful when used correctly? Yes.

Do most people use them correctly? No. So what they do, unfortunately, is they condition us to respond to everything immediately instead of stay within the bounds of proper prioritization and time management. Just because someone sends you a message on Slack or teams doesn't mean that you should be responding to it immediately.

And, you know, One of the things we have to get into with team members is to help them be able to get find a rhythm and a routine with Slack or teams like, Hey, check it at eight, check it at 12, check it at four. But, you know, and to the extent that you can do not ask group messages in those tools because again, you're conditioning people to stop what they're doing, stop working what they're doing, respond to something immediate instead of working on the most critical. Now, you know, people will say, well, can't what happens if something really critical or important comes through Slack? I would argue there are probably better ways to communicate that.

To people than through a group text. Get it to the right person, the person who can make the decision. And yes, there are, you know, those tools can be useful, but they have to be just like email or any other tool used with rules in place so that you are not distorting how people prioritize and manage what's most critical in their day. And remember, what's most critical, your priorities are things tied to the big priorities that you have for the quarter in your role.

And as leaders in organizations and as CEOs, we need to help our teams All of them get in the space of proper prioritization and time management, which is, you know, I use my calendar consistently, I block my time two weeks out, the most successful people I know, time block two weeks out. The least successful people I know are stuck in Slack and email all day long. We've gotta be able to get those people out of Slack and email. And if you're one of those people that is a response mechanism and you're stuck in email, those tend to be our B players or worse.

So food for thought and again, set rules around tools like this to make us more effective.