Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work
“If this tool represented the culmination of our attempts to figure out how to best work together in a digital age, I’d be more concerned, but Slack seems to be more transient. It’s a short-term optimization of our first hasty attempts to make sense of a high-tech professional world that will be followed by more substantial revolutions. The future of office work won’t be found in continuing to reduce the friction involved in messaging but, instead, in figuring out how to avoid the need to send so many messages in the first place.”
I feel like I link to Newport a lot, but I find the way he thinks about work really interesting. I also dislike Slack and miss email something fierce at my current job. Slack is the way we communicate and email is a rarity and usually sent as an announcement and then the email is copied into several Slack channels. But I find that email allows for more thoughtful responses and I miss that because not every situation can be done in quickly typed out short fragments.