Logging On

Slack Made Work More Social. What Does It Do to Your Social Life?

The message app now ubiquitous in many millennial workplaces is seeping into some casual usage.
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Photo Illustration by Lauren Margit Jones; Photos by Nina Leen/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images (women); from Alamy (slack icon).

It only took one day as a freelancer for me to notice the quiet. Not just the quiet that comes from being your only co-worker in an office of one, but a brain quiet, too. The kind of eerie noiselessness that appears when taking leave of the city for a weekend retreat in the woods. No longer having a full-time workplace with a requirement to stay connected with colleagues meant no Slack messages or notifications, which meant very little talking, which meant—suddenly—I felt as if I’d turned off a snow-screened television. Distraction free.

For those who have the pleasure of not knowing what Slack is, allow me to puncture that innocence: Slack is a workplace communication tool that was launched in 2013 to make collaborating with and talking to colleagues easier, a sort of next step in the crusade to detach ourselves from the antiquated system of e-mail. Rather than having to write out a labored, “Hey, Carl! Hope you’re doing well,” before asking a co-worker for something over e-mail, Slack helps you cut some of the fluff. On Slack, you can direct message Carl and come right out with it because the system feels as casual as a text message. You can also join different channels akin to early Internet-era chat rooms to socialize, or integrate apps that enable productivity at your specific kind of workplace.

Slack began to feel ubiquitous in many industries within a year or two of its development. The app now has 9 million users weekly, is currently valued at five billion dollars, and on its site, the company proudly boasts the Los Angeles Times, Airbnb, and Harvard among its many customers. On February 6, the company announced the hire of its first C.F.O., a move that sparked speculation about a potential I.P.O. this year.

Slack’s explosion comes as people yearn more than ever, but find it even harder, to detach from their work lives. Studies show how never logging off negatively affects us, and with an app as informal as Slack, it’s getting harder, not easier, to draw the line between home and work. In 2015, Slack introduced a “Do Not Disturb” feature to notify others when not to bother you (say, outside of work hours), but messages still deliver. You just have to be disciplined enough not to look at them.

And some people have begun taking this constant access to large-group communication to its next logical conclusion. No, they’re not revolting at the workplace and demanding to have their non-work hours returned. Instead, people have begun creating entire Slack groups of their own to talk with friends, in addition to colleagues. If the tool manages to insert a looseness to the workplace, why not use it where that informal conversation already exists? It’s a platform for communication, after all. Anyone can start a new Slack group for free. Instead of Slacking less, some people have begun Slacking more.

A poll of 20 or so friends, all millennials based in New York who work in media and publishing, revealed that almost all of them are in at least one additional Slack group outside of their required work Slack—in most cases two or three. One Slack is made up of a group of sportswriters, another is a few women a friend met while on a fellowship, and another is a group of moms sharing advice and venting. One friend told me she is a member of eight different kinds of non-work Slacks, only one of which is inactive.

Members of her Slack groups are primarily old co-workers or people who work in the industry with her, she said, and the reasons why each group exists vary. “They’re either for people of a common interest to gossip about that common interest,” she explained, “or groups of friends with some unifying theme, like the type of stuff they cover or where we used to work.” While their varied themes make each Slack group’s daily interactions different, for the most part, the Slacks provide the same function as having group texts with friends. “It helps to have groups with my old co-workers to sort of be able to talk about the same shit,” she said. “Then it’s also a good way to stay in touch with people who work at different publications.” She is also in a Slack group related to the quiz-show app, HQ, where participants rapid-fire share answers with each other in the group’s main channel to increase their odds of winning.

So many people are always on the Slack app anyway, as one friend who works in tech theorized, that socializing there is much easier and more discreet than opening up a new e-mail window, Google Hangouts box, or text message. If you are worried that your boss is constantly eyeing you, having the Slack app open gives the illusion that you’re working, even if you’re not. And in many cases, when your additional Slack groups are made up of old co-workers, it’s kind of like you are.

Friends I spoke with who said they weren’t in any additional Slack groups experienced varying degrees of chagrin when I brought it up. “I know a lot of people who are [in other Slack groups],” one writer responded, “but I just don’t know how to use Slack.” So then, would she want to be in one if she had the opportunity? “Yeah. I like being included in everything.”

Another editor friend said she was not in any social Slack groups because “my life is unfulfilling.” Not being in an outside Slack group—at least among the often insular, navel-gazing media industry—seemed to bring up that familiar middle-school feeling of when a new trend suddenly emerges overnight and everyone else seems to be participating in it but you. Another friend, a musician and artist in Philadelphia who solely communicates with friends over group text messages and e-mail, said she knew what Slack was, but “I just know people who use it for work and hate it.”

What had increasingly seemed like an inevitability—everyone knows Slack, and millennial professionals in creative fields use it to an obsessive degree—was much less prevalent when I spoke with people who work in tech and social media, who said they were less inclined to use Slack outside of the workplace. (I also learned that my tech friends who use Slack at work actually employ formal sentence case and more e-mail-like communiqués in their conversations, as opposed to the typo-ridden lowercase messages I was accustomed to sending and receiving.)

A friend who works at a social-media start-up in Seattle doesn’t even use Slack at work, so there’d be no reason to have it socially, he said. A baby-boomer friend who leads an education start-up said she’d never heard of Slack, saying she relied on Monday.com for team organization. When I suggested she might try it, she responded dryly, “I don’t have time to learn a new system, but I need a new system to have more time.” Another friend who works at a New York-based tech start-up polled 44 of his co-workers; only 30 percent said they participated in any non-work use of Slack. Of those people, he said, most used outside Slack channels to connect with family members or larger communities, like professional interest groups or networks of like-minded people—not so much with friends.

This in-between use of Slack seemed most common—not quite a designated workplace, not quite a casual group of friends. For example, a Slack group called Ladies Get Paid was launched in 2016 to build a community that helps career women find work opportunities, share resources, and connect with one another. (Membership comes with a 21-page P.D.F. on how to use the Slack group most efficiently.) In 2016, a writer for Swedish-based Web site Labs, by Earth People, wrote about how he used Slack with his family: integrations with Find My iPhone to reveal where his kids are, syncing their Google Calendars, and even compiling grocery lists. When I reached out to Slack for comment on this new frontier of social non-work Slacks, a spokesperson wrote back, “We’re delighted that people find Slack useful in their personal lives and hope they continue to do so, but it was a tool built for business and we are primarily focused on those users.”

For kicks, I recently reopened my Slack app to see where I stood in all of this. I had completely forgotten that I was in five non-work Slacks of my own. (It’s easy to forget these things when you get accustomed to the beautiful silence.) One was Ladies Get Paid, three were old co-worker Slacks, and one was a group of four friends. I checked my notifications and scrolled through a few channel conversations, and logged out 10 minutes later when I began to feel the itch again. The silence, ultimately, just felt better.