Thread by @ranimolla

Communication seems like a good thing until you have too much of it. It’s so easy to communicate with job software like Slack, Teams and Google Hangouts and Meet that we’re posting more messages than any one person can read. vox.com/recode/2019/5/…

Also, workplace software doesn’t seem to have supplanted the very thing it was supposed to fix: email. Now we have too many Slacks, too many meetings and too many emails. It hasn’t saved us any time according to @rescuetime data:

“If we don’t think critically about how we use the tools, we’re going to be the same exact people in a new place,” said @sarahkpeck. “We’re just moving email to another place and it’s less searchable.”

People were actually more productive during a Slack outage last year than they had been a week earlier. That’s partly because people don’t consider workplace chat apps to be a productive use of their time.

In other words, with workplace chat software, talk is cheap and we’re spending like crazy.

There are more Slack channels than there are employees at each of the large companies @timeisltd measures. The firm estimates that it would be physically impossible for any employee at these companies to read all their Slack messages and channels.

“Productivity software should be something you use less than the thing you used before.” —@sarahcuda

“The designers of these tools designed them to capture your attention,” @mchui said. “It takes attention away from other things we’d like to do in our most thoughtful, reflective idea of how we want to spend time.”

It’s not even necessarily the messaging itself that’s the problem: “It starts off as a Slack message, but continues with social media and reading the news,” @DariusForoux said. “What happens after is a negative side effect.”

Our minds aren’t meant for this type of behavior.

“We don’t perceive the difference between a leopard and a scary Slack message,” @mg said. “You get enough of that into somebody and it becomes mentally problematic.”

For this piece I got to (lovingly) drag my editor @benpauker

After being messaged, it takes about 23 minutes to get back to the task you were working on. To do really focussed work you need 90-minute blocks of uninterrupted time. People send on average 200 Slacks a day. The math is not on the side of getting good work done.

Slack et al aren't as easily dismissed as other habits, ones on which our livelihoods don’t rely. “People can quit social media,” @DariusForoux said. “It’s more difficult to say, ‘I quit Slack.’”

One reason it's hard to fix workplace software issues: “It’s not about setting rules, it’s about what management is modeling, what it’s rewarding,” @sarahcuda said. “People take cues from CEOs, what they say and don’t. Most employees see what work gets rewarded and follow.”

“My personal belief is we haven’t yet invented a tool that would be ideal for corporate communications in large teams,” Time Is Ltd. co-founder and CEO @janrezab told Recode.