Zen of Slack, Part 2: Against DMs

When using Slack you should stop having conversations in DMs which could be interesting to others in the workspace. DMs are appropriate in only two scenarios:

1. No one else other than DM participants would ever care to read the conversation.
2. The conservation is private and sensitive.

Everything else should be in a channel, ideally a public channel. Don’t worry about cluttering channels, we have threads.

Why?

Slack has a backronym, “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”. I think it’s a great backronym, because it places emphasis on a part of Slack which is generally undervalued—its search.

My previous blog post about Slack, from 2021, was How To Ask For Help In Slack. It’s a checklist that is in large part concerned with making Slack search more effective. But something I missed in that first post is that Slack DMs make Slack search less effective. I should have had this as an additional checklist item: “I have asked my question in the appropriate public Slack channel.”

DMs are not searchable by non-participants in the conversation. For good reason, obviously! Therefore, if you have broadly useful conversations in DMs you’re starving others of a valuable resource.

If you are working with one or two others on a bug, it can be tempting to use DMs because “everyone else is doing something else”. But, your peers outside the DM may benefit from your debugging log in future, and your peers may actually continue your debugging if you stop before the finish line.

During or after a customer call, it can be tempting to discuss next steps in a DM only including the people on the call. But why can’t this be out in the open? For the same reason that we nowadays tend to record meetings, you should not use DMs. We want a searchable log.¹

Sorted

I decided to write this ‘Zen of Slack’ follow-up after hearing that my original Slack checklist still gets passed around my last joint, Canva. That post is possibly more enduringly useful than whatever of my code remains!

When done well, a Slack workspace is exactly what it wants to be, a S.L.A.C.K, and it’s great. I’ll never like email, and there’s something just not quite right about Discord. I’m a Slack stan, and I’d love to chat with you there—in a channel, let’s keep out of DMs :)