The benefit of things like Slack is that you can ask a group instead of a specific individual, so I treat group chats like others treat email. You can do that with email, but there’s always the risk that someone will forget to reply all (so multiple people will try to do the same work), or the annoyance that someone replies to the group accidentally. With Slack, I can easily check if someone has responded at my regular check interval.

I very rarely directly message anyone on Slack, because that’s disruptive to their workflow. In the odd case where it needs to go to a single recipient and isn’t urgent, I’ll prefix the message with “not urgent” so they know they can safely ignore the message. The net result is that I can fit multiple use-cases into one system (broadcasts, less urgent one-on-one communication, urgent one-on-one communication), so I only need to check the one place.

At one company before we switched to Slack, I would have to check:

• email - beginning and end of day
• IM - only one-on-one, check 3-4x/day
• notes on my desk - whenever I returned to my desk
• in-person - people were bad at checking email, so I’d to physical followups periodically

Email was our primary communication method, and that had some issues:

• I’d spend way more time answering an email than I do w/ Slack because I want to anticipate as many questions as I can to keep the email conversation short
• we didn’t have groups properly set up, so inevitably we’d forget to add someone to the email chain, which means forwards and whatnot to keep everyone in the loop
• emails would frequently turn into in-person communication because something that seemed less urgent became more urgent

Slack fixed a number of these issues:

• time - whenever I get an urgent notification, I’ll go through and respond to a bunch of less urgent notifications while waiting for a response
• anyone can add anyone to a group, or you can add yourself if you browse groups
• it’s trivial to bump a notification in Slack by @ mentioning someone, either in a reply to a comment, or in a channel

I can usually hold 3-4 separate conversations at the same time in Slack, which I think has reduced our need for meetings. I can give short responses without having to anticipate other potential questions, because I know they’ll probably respond soon. So I end up engaging with Slack more often than email, but I spend less total time using it vs email because I don’t need to think through my responses nearly as carefully.