Whether you’re an experienced old hand at remote collaboration or one of the millions forced into it recently, the frustrations are the same. If your team is large, complex, or simply very chatty, there’s a dynamic tension to resolve on a continual basis: finding sufficient focus and avoiding distraction when you need to do your concentrated deep work tasks, while making sure you don’t overlook critical information and action points being shared in the endless flow of conversation and notifications.
FOMO vs. overload
You can do a lot by really mastering your notifications down to the individual channel level, and getting an agreement in place about how different channels communications tools are used. But this relies on a shared understanding of both what’s important in the first place, and how essential it is to stick to a communication protocol - both of which can be hard to establish when a team is adjusting to a whole new way of working.
Ryan Prosser, CEO of Very, has had more than 18 months to adjust to fully remote working. But his team of 50+ employees quickly found with Slack acting as their ‘central nervous system’ for information flow, a filter was needed to separate the signal from the noise. And the native notification filters could still cause interesting and important messages to get overlooked.
That’s why he created the “ICYMI” bot, so that the team itself could decide which messages were important — by upvoting them at will, and contributing to the generation of a weekly digest of the top-voted messages.
“I don't really want everyone in the general channel waiting around for the big next big announcement”, Prosser said, to explain the genesis of ICYMI.
