Principles of Slack Maximalism

Summary

Recently, I’ve been introduced to a new way to manage an organization’s operations: Slack Maximalism.Coming from a background of using Notion or Google Doc for everything, I now believe that Slack Maximalism is the best way I know to run live operations (i.e. work that is acting on the world in real time and is primarily reactive, like events, or customer service). As the name implies, it involves using Slack a lot.In this post, I’ll describe the principles of Slack Maximalism I’ve discovered, and for each one, show examples of how they’re used to run Inkhaven.Each channel should have one purpose. It should always be obvious which channel is the right channel for a specific message. Each topic which is regularly discussed should have a channel. Channels should be created liberally as soon as they are needed.Each message which does not find its channel is a message at risk of never being sent. Creating new channels signals that a type of message is welcome, and allows pent-up information to finally be shared.Examples from Inkhaven:#inkhaven-activities: for announcing, gauging interest, discussing and cancelling program activities#inkhaven-chatter: general fallback for communication between residents, the fast pace of one-off coordination and requests. Messages get lost or ignored, but creativity flourishes#inkhaven-walks: For coordinating going on walks around the campus. Created on day three when multiple people realized they wanted to go on walks with other residents, and could not find each other in the rapid stream of chatter; or just did not imagine that others were interested.Each person using the Slack workspace should have their own channel, where all the people who have a stake in their work/participation going well should be added. This channel is the ultimate fallback for anything this person has to say.Examples from Inkhaven:Each resident has their own channel, in which they talk to their coach, ask questions of the team, request improvements to their roo...