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Comment by takee | Hacker News Reader

I can totally relate to this. We use a slack equivalent app at my workplace and most of my days are spent trying to make sure I didn't miss an important conversation or a critical issue that I could have helped debug, instead of focusing my time and energy on the task at hand.

It does however help make the remote employees feel more in sync with the rest of the team, because now you're not missing out on the important discussions that would have happened in-person in the past, and you also have a chance to get to know your employees a little more personally. I guess it depends on the company culture to some extent but we seem to have moved all our water cooler discussions to this app.

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Yep, exactly. I used to think Slack was the best thing since sliced bread, and now I keep pushing back to async communications like email to get my concentration and productivity back.

There's nothing about slack that makes it inherently more syncronous than email, as long as you switch off all its dumb notifications to make it work like IRC.

It feels, and this might just be my opinion, that Slack inherently has different response speed expectations than email (or other async comm methods) due to it being a chat client.

Most communication methods other than getting punched in the face are technically asynchronous.

I still think Slack is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I agree with you. If I need to send something non-time-sensitive to a specific person I will still go to email or another channel (1:1 meeting, Basecamp message, Trello card, ticket, etc) rather than sending an @mention.

If it's not specific to an individual, then I think dropping random things in channels works reasonably well asynchronously as it lets everyone decide when they have time to read the given channel, and of course it shows up in search for later reference. Slack stretches the boundaries of real-time communication quite a bit through clever design choices, but that's still its fundamental nature.

Which equivalent app? If you are also using email at your workplace, then your workplace might be missing out on the most important features that make people want to pay for Slack.

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