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The Disagreement

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Cold cubes.

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I tried to summarize 200+ cognitive biases to something I could put on my phone's lock screen. What do you think? If you want to use it too, go to http://bit.ly/thinking-is-hard

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This was a fun interview to do about 750words.com and my obsession with tracking stuff.

The Quantified Writer: Buster Benson on Writing as Thinking

Sometimes, success can be measured, and tracking our progress can hold us accountable to our goals. We interviewed NaNoWriMo board member and founder of 750words.com, Buster Benson, to learn about writing journeys and personal growth: 

You worked at Twitter for a good while. What genre of writing do you think best translates into 140 characters?

After using Twitter for almost ten years, I think it’s most important as a tool to express what’s really going on in your head. It’s a running autobiography drawn with only a few lines. 

I generally try to find parts of my own thought patterns and experiences that are least likely to already be represented in the world somewhere. Rather than writing what everyone else is writing, find the small things that are true to you that nobody else is writing about.

You founded 750 Words, which is a site that helps people to free-write 750 words, or three pages, daily. Do word-count goals really help to promote productivity?

Keep reading

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Happy birthday, Slack! 🎂

Slack is turning two! To think, a year ago today we had 500,000 daily active users, and now there are over 2 million of you using Slack every day with your teams. To help support you, our own team has grown from 103 to 369 Slack employees. We’re chuffed, and we couldn’t have done it without you (we wouldn’t want to, anyways). Here’s to another great year. Onwards!

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Inclusion and Diversity at Slack

Today we are reporting our diversity data. We are not the first technology company to report this and by now, you probably know what that blog post looks like. We are doing many of the same things other companies are doing and have already described. In this process, we asked ourselves a simple question – how can we do better? At Slack, we believe being an inclusive and diverse workplace is not optional. We understand that our industry is not a welcoming place to everyone and we want to do our part to change that. 

Let’s start with the basics: the numbers.

Racial & Ethnic Identity

This summer, we asked our employees to answer a few voluntary questions about racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ identity. All questions were optional, but nearly all employees elected to participate. Here are what the numbers told us about what Slack looks like:

Women at Slack

We pulled data from our HR information systems to generate a current snapshot of our gender distribution. The percentages below reflect the percentage of women in each of the respective categories.

  Context & Notes on the Data

While 45% of all people managers at Slack are women, it’s noteworthy (and not shown above) that fully 41% of all people working at Slack have a woman as their manager. This means that 41% of our people report to a woman who help set their priorities, measure their performance, mentor them in their work, and who make recommendations that will impact their compensation and career growth.

It’s also worth noting that the engineering vs non-engineering distinction we used was different than the more frequently used “technical vs non-technical” categorization. Only people who write and commit code and are part of our internal engineering organization are counted as engineers; the design and product management teams are included in the non-engineering category.

While “Hispanic/Latino” was an option for respondents, responses totalled less than 1% — too small a percentage to report at this time. (It is possible that some people with Hispanic or Latino backgrounds elected to identify as multi-racial).

In addition to all of the above 10.3% of our employees consider themselves to be part of the LGBTQ community. All data is shown as a percentage of our worldwide employee population.

Why This Matters To Us 

Everyone at Slack agrees that diversity and inclusion are important but not everyone at Slack agrees about why. Some people here believe diverse teams produce better business results. Others see the issue in terms of social justice and addressing inequality of opportunity. And some just don’t want to work at a place where the population is overwhelmingly homogeneous. All are valid and important reasons. At the end of the day, the “why” isn’t important when we all clearly agree on the “what.” 

Even so, these issues can be tough for people to talk about. When we published the survey results internally there was a desire to ensure that we were not self-congratulatory about those areas in which we were “doing better” than our peers at other companies and some questions about why we need to measure any of this at all.

It has been said that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Clearly, measurement is important and we have already taken that step. But numerical targets present some inherent challenges: what is the goal, if there even is one? Should our workforce represent/reflect the composition of San Francisco? The Bay Area? California? The world? Does that mean there is a point at which we’ve “won”? We don’t think so. These reports are not a scoreboard.

We want to hold our feet to the fire and measure whether or not our strategies — particularly those for retention and diversity across our different internal organizations — are effective. We don’t have a single metric for what success looks like, but we do know that numbers are useful as a check and balance against our own subjective impressions and qualitative feedback. We also know that we can be better and we know it’s a process of continual improvement, not a destination. 

What We Are Doing

Our primary goal is to avoid becoming yet another place where underrepresented groups exit the technology industry. We don’t want to be a place where people give up on their ambitions. All kinds of people should be able to be successful at Slack. While much focus has been on the pipeline, we understand that increasing the diversity of applicants and new hires will not result in any significant change if people from underrepresented groups cannot thrive at the company. Workplace policies that foster inclusion are equally important.

How do we achieve a workplace where all people can thrive? We do this by:

Examining all decisions regarding hiring/recruiting, promotion, compensation, employee recognition and management structure to ensure that we are not inadvertently advantaging one group over another.

Working with expert advisors and employees to build fair and inclusive processes for employee retention, such as effective management education, company-wide unconscious bias training, ally skills coaching, and compensation review.

Helping to address the pipeline issue with financial contributions to organizations whose mission is to educate and equip underrepresented groups with relevant technical skills (like Hack the Hood and Grace Hopper), as well as supporting a variety of internship programs to broaden access to opportunity (like CODE2040). 

Attempting to be conscious and deliberate in our decision-making and the principles and values by which we operate. Changing our industry starts by building a workplace that is welcoming to all so that a generation of role models, examples and mentors is created.

Perhaps the single most important thing we are doing right now is addressing this issue in the infancy of our organizational history. Slack has fewer than 250 employees worldwide today and our product has existed in the market for less than two years. We began reviewing our workplace policies with an outside diversity consultant when we had only 75 employees on our books.

We are reporting our diversity data early on. We have already begun examining our compensation data to ensure that we are paying men and women equitable wages. We are being vigilant in our data collection and analysis so that we can make real-time adjustments to our recruiting efforts and our workplace policies so that we don’t get behind the eight-ball on these important issues.

It is relatively easy for us to move the lever a small bit right now to make a significant change in our trajectory. It has been said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If us doing this sooner rather than later yields a better result that alone will be a good thing for us to have done at Slack and, hopefully, for the industry at large

We want to ensure that we hire the very best people we can. That means taking steps to minimize and remove bias in our processes. It also means looking for candidates who have non-traditional backgrounds. We find some of our best people did not take the shortest or most predictable path between points A and B. Their collective experience and perspective make Slack a better and more diverse place. If you are one of those people, we want you to work at Slack. 

Anne Toth, VP of People & Policy Stewart Butterfield, CEO

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Just launched this.

Just Press ‘Add to Slack’

As much fun as Slack is, it’s even better when you plug other applications into it. Our integrations page lists over 80 applications custom tailored to interact with Slack, and beyond that list we have thousands of developers using our API to build custom applications. But to date there has been a problem sharing custom apps for Slack—getting a copy of someone’s code, spinning up a server, and configuring incoming and outgoing webhooks is tedious and a lot of work.

Today we’re taking the first step towards making it easier by debuting a streamlined way to share the custom integrations developers have written: The Add to Slack Button.

Enter: Add to Slack

You’ll soon find a button on many of your favorite apps and sites that says “Add to Slack”. Clicking the button will take you to an authentication page where you’ll pick which Slack team you’d like to integrate with the service, and which channel (or your own @slackbot) the service will report to (provided your Team admin/owners allow team members to add integrations).

Once configured, any web apps or services that send you notifications or emails can start automatically reporting those to Slack. Many apps and services will also give you the ability to share things into Slack without leaving their app; handy!

Examples

Today this feature debuts in a dozen apps, with many more to soon follow. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Nuzzel is an amazing companion app for Twitter, scanning your followers and alerting you whenever multiple friends mention the same link. In practice, it does a great job showing you stuff you’re interested in by nature of the people you follow. If you’re into tech, you’ll get more tech news, if you’re into sports, your Nuzzel feed will alert you to the biggest sports stories. Nuzzel currently runs as an iPhone app and webapp, sending alerts to your phone and via email, but with the Add to Slack button you can get alerts either in channels shared by others or your own personal Slackbot.

(Similar service also launching Add to Slack today: Breaking News)

InVision is a prototyping tool for teams to hash out new designs. Mockups shared with the app can be annotated and comments collected among your team. With the Add to Slack feature, now you can share new designs inside the InVision app directly into a Slack team channel.

(Similar services also launching Add to Slack today: Wake, 99Designs, Zeplin)

Box is an online file sharing and collaboration service aimed at business. Once enabled, their Add to Slack feature means you can share things from within Box to your Slack team channels without leaving the app.

(Similar services also launching Add to Slack today: HelloSign, Airtable)

But that’s not all!

The Add to Slack button is launching in the following services as well: Intercom, Launchkit, Lever, and Cronitor.

This is just the beginning

The Add to Slack feature isn’t limited to just our launch partners. If you run a service or app that periodically sends notifications, or you’d like users to share their work directly into Slack without leaving your app, chances are you could easily make use of this feature. Our documentation on the new Add to Slack feature details the steps necessary to build it into your application today and start offering the feature to your users tomorrow.

Finally, since there are so many more apps you’ll want to hook into Slack, today we’re also raising the limit of integrations a free team can have from 5 to 10.

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😍

722 ways to say “I got your message”

Since the launch of Slack, people have asked for a way to “fave” or “like” messages — a simple, public way to acknowledge or approve a message. We already had the ability to star messages, (which is useful for creating personal reminders and quick to-do lists, but isn’t visible, or intended for communal use). But we knew that if people wanted something for showing appreciation that everyone else could see, we really needed something else.

We feel confident in saying that the feature we’re rolling this morning is pretty much the epitome of “something else”.

We argued about what symbol we would use — a heart, a star, a thumbs-up, a check-mark. But then we realized that all these were already in the default emoji set… along with the dancers, the sparkles, the monkeys, the smiling, crying, grimacing faces, and the poop.

Emoji reactions were born.

And after months of testing, we’re pretty sure it’ll change how you use Slack. Sure, you can use this to “like” messages, as so many people have requested. But there are many other uses. These are just a few we’ve discovered on our own team.

Vote with reactions You can use the obvious “thumbs up or thumbs down”, or get more creative.

Plus one Want to set something up, but not sure how many of the team are on board? Just add a + as a reaction to your own message, and the number next to it will climb as people add their assent. You get on with your day and let us do the math for you! Treat yo’ self!

A Show of Support Does something deserve applause? Give it some. Since you can add custom emoji, you could even add an animated gif of applause. Or fireworks. Or whatever.

Greeting a new team member Everyone deserves a warm greeting on their first day. Now it’s easier to avoid a wall of welcomes or the anguish of trying to find a totally new and original way of saying “Hi!” — a simple wave can do much the same thing.

More joy, less chatter When good news hits a Slack channel, it’s important to add your message of support to a chorus, but on a large team that can amount to a whole lot of messages. With reactions, you can express your joy with an ever-increasing number of emoji in a tidy way.

Done it? Want to report back quickly to a request? Add a tick. A big green tick.

And then maybe the requester will add a happy face. And also a big thumbs up because you did a good job. And then you could add a blushing face. Look, we don’t want to legislate the whole conversation, but the point is: the possibilities are almost endless. (Or actually endless, depending on how many custom emoji your team like to add).

All this, and a new Emoji Picker to boot

To make this new feature easy to use and emoji better (and frankly more logical) everywhere else in the app, we’ve also revamped the emoji picker. No longer will you wonder why hand gestures used to be under the “rat” tab, instead you’ll find simpler categories, that are also scrollable (and searchable) letting you find exactly what you’re looking for with far less effort.

And that’s not all!

In addition to the reactions on messages and files, AND the new emoji picker, we’ve updated the Recent Mentions tab in the top right corner to also include reactions, so you can review any new reactions added to things you’ve posted all over Slack, in one place. Slack will even alert you to new reactions by changing the @ symbol in the button to the recent reaction’s emoji.

It’s basically magic.

Or, at the very least, really quite good technology.

We hope you enjoy the new reaction emoji, and would love to hear of new and inventive ways your team chooses to use them - let us know on twitter at @SlackHQ, or by emailing stories@slack.com

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My book of cartoons ‘You’re All Just Jealous of my Jetpack’ is available now: US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1770461043 UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1770461043 Other stockists and info at www.tomgauld.com (you can also buy prints there).

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Day 333

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It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”

Abraham Lincoln, 1859 (via austinkleon)

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It struck me that part of the reason we always stay jacked in is that we want everyone — at the other end of the phone, on Facebook and Twitter, on the web, on email — to know that we are part of the now. If we look away, we worry we will disappear.

David Carr, writing eloquently as usual about the death of print. (via parislemon)

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Artist Recreates Childhood Scribbles as Digital Illustrations Over 20 Years Later

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More people should do things like this.

Playing with Twitter Analytics

Recently Twitter released an analytics dashboard for Twitter Cards. It’s a well designed and interesting tool showing you a lot of useful information about each of your tweets. For each tweet you can see how many times it was viewed, how many times people engaged with it (like clicking your username or hashtags, retweeting it, or even viewing the tweet detail page), and the overall engagement rate.  I’m impressed that Twitter is freely and openly exposing this to all of its customers and not just those that pay for promoted tweets. 

Even more impressive is that Twitter allows you to export all of this data out of the dashboard into a CSV file. Having some free time waiting for my car to get fixed, I decided to play around with this data a little more…

Read More

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Write because you want to communicate with yourself. Write because you want to communicate with someone else. Write because life is weird and tragic and amazing. Write because talking is difficult. Write because it polishes the heart. Write because you can. Write because you can’t. Write because there is a blackbird outside of my window right now and oh my god isn’t that the best start to the day? Write because you’re trying to figure yourself out. Write because you might not ever figure yourself out. Write because there still aren’t enough love poems in the world.

Dalton Day, interviewed for Banango Street (via bostonpoetryslam)

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Someone left this post-it on my desk and I don’t think I’ll ever recover.

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