Slackās not perfect, but here are some features I like:
Emotes let you ārespondā to a message in less than a second with zero typing. At CEA, we have an āeyesā emote that means āIāve seen this messageā, which saves me 30 seconds over sending a āthanks for sending this, Iāve read itā email. We have lots of other emotes that stand in for other kinds of quick messages. I send a lot less email at CEA than I did in my most recent corporate job, at a tech firm with pretty standard messaging practices.
Channels act as a proactive sorting system. CEA has an āimportantā channel for time-sensitive things that everyone should read and a āgeneralā channel for things that everyone should read, but that arenāt time-sensitive. If all the messages on those channels were emails, Iād wind up reading them all as they came in, but in Slack I can ignore most of them until I hit the time in my day when I want to catch up on messages, without spending any energy on sorting.
Slack also has a feature that lets you set āstatusesā in the same way the HBR article discusses (e.g. āworking on important thing, available after 4:00 pmā), which takes less time than writing an auto-reply and also doesnāt add dozens of automated emails to other peopleās inboxes when they try contacting you.
Slackās not perfect, but here are some features I like:
Emotes let you ārespondā to a message in less than a second with zero typing. At CEA, we have an āeyesā emote that means āIāve seen this messageā, which saves me 30 seconds over sending a āthanks for sending this, Iāve read itā email. We have lots of other emotes that stand in for other kinds of quick messages. I send a lot less email at CEA than I did in my most recent corporate job, at a tech firm with pretty standard messaging practices.
Channels act as a proactive sorting system. CEA has an āimportantā channel for time-sensitive things that everyone should read and a āgeneralā channel for things that everyone should read, but that arenāt time-sensitive. If all the messages on those channels were emails, Iād wind up reading them all as they came in, but in Slack I can ignore most of them until I hit the time in my day when I want to catch up on messages, without spending any energy on sorting.
Slack also has a feature that lets you set āstatusesā in the same way the HBR article discusses (e.g. āworking on important thing, available after 4:00 pmā), which takes less time than writing an auto-reply and also doesnāt add dozens of automated emails to other peopleās inboxes when they try contacting you.