Do you ever feel like you learn the same lesson over and over again? That was me today as I lamented in my morning pages about how it’s so difficult to just share small, regular updates with everyone at work. Low stakes, low pressure, high visibility and always good vibes.
Some 750 words later and I’d realized (yet again) that I’ve felt this pain before, and solved it before, and felt good about it before. It wasn’t some new product. It wasn’t some home-grown tool. It wasn’t some mega-Notion-brain database. It was a channel, in Slack, for all. Now, I’ve done all of those other things, but the most successful was always a silly little channel. Just a message in a stream. No titles, no tags.
I remember back in 2020 hearing about someone at Deliveroo who had made a channel like this, and it was better in name and in framing than anything I’d come up with before: WAYWO (what are you working on). I won’t describe it here, because it turns out (unbeknownst to me at the time) that they wrote about it (and on Medium, no less). Stop reading this post and read that post! Clap. Comment. Be inspired.
If you’re still here though, one final note: I’ve found over and over again that if you want something to stick, you should keep it simple. In this case, by avoiding too much structure; by using the tool that people are already using. I give Slack a lot of flack, but words in a big old undifferentiated stream are better than no words at all.
p.s. Hey Rob, big fan, love your work, realizing now that I sat next to you at a Mr. Bingo talk in Shoreditch. See you on the internet, etc.