Moreover email is federated, distributed & seamless.
In my previous startup, A Slack account was the second thing I created for a new employee after an email account. Everything from real-time communication, screen-sharing, log/product/system health alerts, analytics to daily tasks summary were handled with the help of slack bots; we ourselves built a bot for the platform.
But the productivity benefits of real-time communications are dubious at best. Apart from alerts(read emergency), email communication is better than real-time chat IMO, as the lack of peer pressure to reply fast enables more thoughtful communication.
So to test this, In my current work(Startup Coaching) I communicate only via email with my clients, no phone calls, no chats. It's been over a year and it's been great for productivity for both myself & my clients; of course this has been possible because there's no emergency communication involved.
When I see people asking for discord channel in Internet forums/subreddit which has no use for a real-time communication, it worries me.
What’s entertaining to me on this topic is that I am no more “immediately available” on slack than I am by email - I close out both when I want to get work done.
And, based solely on various productivity blogposts which come up on HN and Reddit, I’m not alone. I can even say that the number of us “going offline to work” types is growing with time.
To me the big benefit of Slack over email is that Slack is only communication with actual humans. My email inbox is chock full of automated emails from various websites / services.
> To me the big benefit of Slack over email is that Slack is only communication with actual humans
Until folks in your org start adding in slack integration bots. I have multiple channels that are nothing but alert/notifications about systems. that separation may be useful, but it definitely requires some discipline - I've been on some teams where people wanted to throw in automated slack integration messaging in to the 'regular' channels "so we won't miss anything".
Yeah, we have a few of those at work. But I've muted those channels. Too noisy to be useful. The only one I keep on is downtime notifications, which really do need to be responded to ASAP.
In my previous startup, A Slack account was the second thing I created for a new employee after an email account. Everything from real-time communication, screen-sharing, log/product/system health alerts, analytics to daily tasks summary were handled with the help of slack bots; we ourselves built a bot for the platform.
But the productivity benefits of real-time communications are dubious at best. Apart from alerts(read emergency), email communication is better than real-time chat IMO, as the lack of peer pressure to reply fast enables more thoughtful communication.
So to test this, In my current work(Startup Coaching) I communicate only via email with my clients, no phone calls, no chats. It's been over a year and it's been great for productivity for both myself & my clients; of course this has been possible because there's no emergency communication involved.
When I see people asking for discord channel in Internet forums/subreddit which has no use for a real-time communication, it worries me.