I’m just fine with email. Why Slack?
Today, email is still the widely used tool for communication. This post briefly explains how Slack can change the dynamics.
Let’s imagine you live in an apartment that has about 50 other residents, and you live in the 8th floor. Think, there is a mail room downstairs where everyone’s mail arrives. Every time you need to access your mail, you’ll need to walk down, pick up your stuff, throw away the unwanted advertisements, decide whats for now and whats for later, and finally start reading only the ones you need. That’s how most emails work.
Enter our new employee, Mr. Kim. He’s going to be our intelligent mail room incharge. Things have changed. Every time mail arrives, Kim automatically discards the useless advertisements, so you never see them again. He also puts up the common birthday party invites in the notice board, so you’ll see them next time you take a walk to the park. He also knows what mail you care about, so he’ll come deliver it at your doorstep. And guess what, if the bank has sent you legal documents, he understands its super critical and he’ll call you immediately and make sure you’re aware of it. That’s Slack for you!
Slack is nothing but a cleverly designed simple group chat program where conversations happen under topics. The general pattern in email is there are several conversations that may be related to each other and are coming in at different points in time. In Slack, all of this information is neatly grouped under topics and there are different ways of setting urgency levels so that Slack will notify the user accordingly. Slack also integrates well with most commonly used software, so that updates from those software can also be fed into the relevant topics to bring all collaboration into one place. Whether it is a continuous integration system or a cloud platform storing documents, they can all post directly into Slack.
The way Slack is designed, it has an inbuilt sense of urgency that’s very useful in many ways. By reducing the amount of time one needs to spend on finding useful information, and understanding the users based on the urgency of the message, Slack revolutionized the way people communicate and aid teams in getting a lot more done in lot less time.
If you liked this post, stay tuned. There’s a lot more ideas we have tried and tested on Slack, that is to follow.
