The one Slack channel to create

As many people consider what mix they and their companies should have of in-person and distributed work, a lot of thought is to put into the gaps left behind when everyone isn’t in an office together. Beyond camaraderie, how do you account for the cross-pollination of people and ideas, the “I just had a thought” moments getting coffee (or matcha).

I made the decision long before the pandemic that I intended for my next venture to be a remote-first company, and so far that’s coming to fruition. We’ve invested heavily in infrastructure and processes, building up various systems to allow for not only remote work but as much asynchronous work as possible. This includes a variety of slack channels for different purposes – despite having a 4:1 channel:person ratio at the outset.

Created on a whim, one of the most important communication channels is #riffing. Not that we have much messaging etiquette otherwise, but this channel is solely to share raw thoughts and fragments. As close to stream of consciousness as possible, this is where we drop in the shower ideas, bits of messaging brought up in conversation, anything. If I overhear a mentor or participant state something in an interesting way, it goes in there. If I’m engaging with some deeper reflection and have a few strategic concepts, I’ll put it in there.

Because the channel is purposely for immature thoughts, we’ve naturally developed a “yes, and” approach to it – whereas if something comes up that you don’t necessarily agree with, you can simply let it float by on the stream of ideas.

We regularly revisit the log to see what we’ve brought up before – especially with regards to messaging and branding ideas.

So, #riffing.