Apr 22, 2022
Why move from Slack to Twist?
We were addicted to Slack. It was brought to us by a marketer — he had been sitting on it for a long time, working in the Berlin office. We did not want to try for a long time; we knew that problems would begin, a constant desire to check the thread. Everyone has families, children, and private lives. Everyone had… As a result, the whole team stayed up all night with red eyes and endlessly scrolled through more and more new threads. Mornings were the hardest: turn off the alarm and immediately have a little slack. Suddenly, there are reactions to the post, or someone is arguing in your thread. And if there are no reactions, you cannot find a place for yourself. Teammates stopped watching videos on YouTube because slack took up all the working time.
Notifications, notifications, notifications.
You enable the “do not disturb” mode but then dive into Slack again. A designer could draw a registration form for half an hour and then discuss it all day and collect reactions. Slack was everywhere: on your desktop, on your phone screen, even on your watch.
Even if you collapse it, the icon seems to speak to you in the words of Angel de Couatié:
I need attention. I don’t require much. How to live if you do not feel that I think about you, dream about you? It’s unbearable. A flower cannot live without the sun, and I cannot live without attention. It’s so natural…
And then, one day, a new employee popped up at the door. We offered to add her to Slack immediately, but she refused. She knew everything about Slack, but she managed to quit and was now completely clean.
She suggested something new — Twist. All correspondence is organised there, as in the mail. One topic, one thread. Without many groups and channels. In Twist, you can focus on one topic without being distracted by notifications from dozens of channels. Everyone can make a new post, not just a discussion group. I want to write a valuable comment to the post, which will somehow advance the matter further. This is convenient for asynchronous communication when everyone in the team works at their own pace but knows about the end goal.
What we’ve noticed in a year of using Twist instead of Slack:
1. Less irritation. Nobody asks for an instant response. Way more time for a thoughtful and valuable response.
2. We have more time. We measured the done list and its value for the common cause.
3. Suitable for teams up to 50 people (maybe more, but we don’t have that many). The context is not lost, but meaningfulness appears in the correspondence.
4. Convenient search. Fewer unnecessary messages make it faster to find what you need. I rarely use the investigation. The list of topics on the left is very descriptive.
5. Convenient integration with Doist. Even if you use Doist for personal tasks, nothing gets mixed up.
I can recommend testing Twist on one department or a small team and then, if successful, deploy it to everyone.
Although I have consistently underestimated the influence of such tools, stress goes down, productivity goes up, and performance is an innate quality of the nervous system.
Write some questions and feedback in the comments if you are already addicted to Twist.
