Messaging is to email as texting is to physical mail: you send physical mail or email when what you want to send isn't quickly dashed off or replied to, but you

Messaging is to email as texting is to physical mail: you send physical mail or email when what you want to send isn't quickly dashed off or replied to, but you also take a large risk that the recipient will never see it (spam filtered), or never bother to read it (left in the inbox with tens of thousands of other emails, hundreds of which are from that very morning), or never reply. Also, you never know if someone turned off read receipts, so you can't even assume they didn't see it and start the escalation message with "Hey, I know you haven't gotten to this yet, but..." So, for a number of years now texting, Slack, or Messenger was the way to be clearer about the intention of only taking a moment of someone's time, which makes it more likely that they'll pay attention. I've been dismayed, as recently as this week, to see on shared screens a red Slack badge that has numbers in the hundreds. What we really need is much, much better prioritization systems.