Depth: Why Slack Will Never Entirely Replace Email

If you say something often enough, it becomes fact. At least, that seems to be the hope.

“Email is dead”, or so we’re led to believe, to be replaced by Slack.

Recently, Dharmesh Shah pointed out that slack doesn’t allow cross-organisational communication, which is a reason that it couldn’t currently replace email. I agree with his assessment but I would also like to add another reason why I believe we will be using email for quite some time, whether or not that particular limitation is fixed.

Slack is chat, with a searchable archive and some great integrations.

There, I said it. Put me in the “uncool” category if you must.

It does all of this very, very nicely, with great onboarding and cross-device support, which is why it has caught on so successfully, but there is little about it that we haven’t seen before.

Again, feel free to unfriend me, unfollow me, etc. Such is the popularity of the rhetoric on this topic.

So why couldn’t chat, in such a successful form, entirely replace email?

Chat is great for lighter, fast-paced forms of communication, such as conversation and collaboration.

Email suits deeper more considered thinking of the kind Cal Newport (“Deep Work”) mentions we — individuals and corporations alike — so desperately need in order to create, innovate and build anything.

You simply won’t find that depth of thought surfacing on chat, no matter how well implemented or successful. It occurs largely in email and shared documents, where the author can spend a while crafting more considered content and pursuing longer, more coherent flights of thought.

Chat may entirely replace some uses of email, but I believe many will remain.

If you still need convincing, add to this the ways in which people store and organise email for their own regular use and retrieval — something I find hard to believe that a searchable Slack archive will achieve — and I remain unconvinced that we will be deleting our email accounts anytime soon.

Way back in 2002, I worked in a large investment banking environment that used chat as its main internal communications tool. It was used so effectively that this particular bank was often referred to as “eerily silent”, even on the trading floor, due to its successful and prolific integration into the culture there. Working in IT, we successfully built integrations with bank systems and surfaced them as chat bots. But crucially, everyone in that organisation still also actively used email alongside chat, because it was required for those deeper, more considered thoughts and exchanges.

So if I may be permitted a prediction, in the sea of “email is dead” rhetoric, it’s that we will be using email far into the future, perhaps alongside our Slack accounts.

Image: By Staselnik (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons