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...but slack is async. Calls are for realtime. If their company tried to use slack to mean syncronous communication, that seems like the root problem.

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Slack is async in the same way phone calls are async. You absolutely don't have to respond immediately on a phone call or on slack, the technology really doesn't care.

They are both used conversationally though and that means they follow the social conventions around conversations.

Slack is distinctly different from phone calls because it has the concept of presence. You can be "online" but "away". There is no such concept for phone calls. The closest thing to that is something like Discord rooms with always-on audio.

My Slack usage is definitely async. The icon is kept on the far left edge of a 43" display. How async varies from person to person, day to day. This likely works because we have more than one person in every group able to field inquiries with appointed people for critical workflows.

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