Slack replacing email hasn't reduced meeting time, it's…
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Slack replacing email hasn't reduced meeting time, it's just spread the interruption evenly across every waking hour, and we've agreed to call that progress
The pitch for messaging tools was always the same. Faster than email, more flexible than meetings, less formal than either. What actually happened is the meetings didn't move, the emails didn't shrink, and now you've got a third channel that runs 14 hours a day expecting responses inside 20 minutes.
Look at any team using Slack seriously. The calendar didn't get emptier, it just got a shadow layer of DMs that block work between the meetings that block work. The productive stretches used to be the hour between meetings. Now that hour has 40 pings in it.
The tell is when someone posts 'moving to focus mode' before a two-hour block. Nobody used to announce their intention to work. That announcement is entirely because the default expectation drifted to 'always reachable.' The tool didn't cause it, but it made it so easy to reach for that we forgot there was a choice.
Nobody's going back to email. But calling this less interruptive is one of the softest lies knowledge work still tells itself.
#conversation
The pitch for messaging tools was always the same. Faster than email, more flexible than meetings, less formal than either. What actually happened is the meetings didn't move, the emails didn't shrink, and now you've got a third channel that runs 14 hours a day expecting responses inside 20 minutes.
Look at any team using Slack seriously. The calendar didn't get emptier, it just got a shadow layer of DMs that block work between the meetings that block work. The productive stretches used to be the hour between meetings. Now that hour has 40 pings in it.
The tell is when someone posts 'moving to focus mode' before a two-hour block. Nobody used to announce their intention to work. That announcement is entirely because the default expectation drifted to 'always reachable.' The tool didn't cause it, but it made it so easy to reach for that we forgot there was a choice.
Nobody's going back to email. But calling this less interruptive is one of the softest lies knowledge work still tells itself.
#conversation
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