Can Slack become the one communication tool to rule them all?

I was an early and vocal fan of Slack. I helped bring it into Upstart and have even set it up for a number of one-off use cases. I had high hopes that a new tool would give us a chance to fix some of the issues that have plagued email. We are now a few years in, and the results are decidedly mixed. I don’t blame Slack here, but I think we are all struggling to figure out how to manage our technology tools to be more productive — and avoid having them become non-stop distractions.

Slack has really taken over the bulk of my internal communications. It has become an invaluable tool for me. Let’s start with the things that make Slack a great tool.

• Integrations from outside systems to provide alerts/notices. We have a number of systems that post real time. These are incredibly useful and turn Slack into a sort of command center for my daily life.
• Defaulting to channel/team communication so that information is shared broadly. This is really useful in keeping a whole team up-to-date. Too many times with email we leave people off “to spare their inbox” and not because they shouldn’t know something. I think sharing more information more broadly is generally very useful for an organization.
• Real-time communications. This is sort of Slack’s bread and butter and it works incredibly well.

However, there are still a number of ways in which Slack bothers me — and can become a distraction that pulls me away from my more meaningful work. I think there are two overall concepts that almost all communication technologies handle poorly — and most of us end up using multiple communications tools to separate communications along these axes.

‌Synchronous vs Asynchronous
The first concept I think is overlooked is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communications needs. Sometimes when I am contacting someone, I really need an immediate answer and sometimes I don’t. However, Slack (and most communication tools) don’t let me differentiate between these two kinds of messages.

In general, Slack tends to default to synchronous communication — but that’s not always what we want. Many questions are looking for more thoughtful, considered answers. The default to synchronous communication pushes people to quicker, simpler answers. This means I send many issues in need of more though via email instead of Slack.

Interrupt Levels
The second, related issue is around what I (in a throw-back to my engineering days) call interrupt levels — that is how much do I want to interrupt what someone else is doing for them to see this message. For some messages this is quite high, for others it is very low.

This is somewhat solved within channels by disabling notifications and then allowing users to leverage @here and @channel to send notifications for more urgent issues. However, it is much harder in one-to-one messages where there is no way to really designate whether a message is urgent or not. In general I treat Slack as a non-urgent channel and then have people use phone/text for urgent issues.

Perhaps the vision of having a unified communications tool that can handle the full breadth of communication needs just isn’t practical and we will forever be stuck using different tools for different needs. However, I continue to dream of the day I will have one tool for all of my company communication needs — something that is flexible enough to fill all of my needs. Maybe one day Slack will be there — but not yet.

Originally published at https://jeffkeltner.com on April 29, 2019.