No.
I was speaking with a client of mine this morning about just this topic. They asked me what I thought of Slack, which turned unfortunately turned into a rant by me of why I don’t use Slack and won’t use Slack.
I’ve drawn my line in the sand on this one.
People have different methods of communication. Some people like active communication, some like passive. Some people like verbal, some nonverbal. Some people are visual, some auditory, and some are kinesthetic.
This means that like to pass information in entirely different ways, for entirely different purposes.
And most people don’t honestly care enough to find out what someone else’s preferred method of communication is, they just blast things out the way they want to hear it and expect everyone to accept it that way.
(This is why people tend to gravitate toward people with similar traits. It makes things much easier.)
Email is passive communication. There’s no urgency attached to it. You may open something, read it, think about it, and reply later or not at all.
Slack is active communication. It requires you to act upon it. You can’t avoid it. You can’t get away with “I didn’t see your message” because if you’re online, you’re a part of the system. There’s an urgency to it.
Facebook, Snapchat, Linkedin, iMessage etc all have “read receipts” on their messages so you know that someone saw your message. These are active communication – you are now adding an urgency to something that didn’t exist before.
One of the things I love about Twitter is it is passive communication – you send something out, and it allows you to take a breath. No urgency – even in real time.
Read Receipts are killing us. They’re forcing us to be present when we don’t want to be. They’re forcing us to be “on” all the time when we need to untether ourselves sometimes to get real work done.
Slack does not reduce email traffic, it just adds a different kind of noise to an already noisy day.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/Do-companies-that-use-Slack-notice-a-reduction-in-email-traffic
Originally Posted On: 2016-03-03