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Disclaimer: I work at Automattic. Your comment does remind me of what we strive to do with communication at Automattic. Since a team can be split all over the

Disclaimer: I work at Automattic. Your comment does remind me of what we strive to do with communication at Automattic. Since a team can be split all over the world, synchronous communication is never a given. Though email is rarely used, we do use P2. Basically, each team has a blog. You write posts to provide significant context and shape discussion around a certain project or problem. Others comment on those posts in long-form text as needed. This is all searchable by any member of the company, unlike email! And then we also have a knowledge base for documentation. (Basically just a WordPress site where you write pages about different topics.) So if you need to find context and past conversations about X, you can easily search for that. We do skip step B, and “synchronous” communication happens in Slack. Even then, it’s still async. I’ll message a teammate today and have no expectation they would respond until their timezone comes around again. If needed, it would be a video call. Plus, Slack messages are also aggregated into the internal search tool. I think there isn’t much need for a “busy signal” when there’s no cultural expectation for anyone to be immediately available for conversations. This situation is far superior than other remote setups I’ve seen, but does it make you calmer? Maybe! I find that the stuff that affects calmness is emotional or psychological. I can’t just log off and be disconnected — my brain still spends cycles thinking about problems. That can’t be solved with better communication systems. It’s just hard to stop thinking about work, since it consumes so much of your day!

solatic 5y ago
> We do skip step B, and “synchronous” communication happens in Slack. Even then, it’s still async. I’ll message a teammate today and have no expectation they would respond until their timezone comes around again. If needed, it would be a video call. Plus, Slack messages are also aggregated into the internal search tool. Recall the original article. When you do async communication in Slack, you're encouraging laziness in the sense that people will just write "Hello" as if it were synchronous communication. Email encourages people to write full letters for asynchronous communication. This improves the quality of asynchronous communication, compared to Slack. If you engage in synchronous communication over Slack, then you're engaging in a relatively inefficient way to communicate synchronously compared to a telephone / video call or meeting. Furthermore, unless you sit in a formal meeting, you rarely have the knowledge base open in front of you to be edited as part of the meeting, thereby ensuring that the meeting produced something. If you allow synchronous communication to happen over Slack, then yes, that's searchable, but unless it happens in a public channel, it's not searchable by everyone, and Slack makes it too easy to screenshot discussion, promoting cover-your-ass behavior even for one-off statements made during "synchronous" discussion. In short, Slack is an anti-tool.

solatic 5y ago

> We do skip step B, and “synchronous” communication happens in Slack. Even then, it’s still async. I’ll message a teammate today and have no expectation they would respond until their timezone comes around again. If needed, it would be a video call. Plus, Slack messages are also aggregated into the internal search tool. Recall the original article. When you do async communication in Slack, you're encouraging laziness in the sense that people will just write "Hello" as if it were synchronous communication. Email encourages people to write full letters for asynchronous communication. This improves the quality of asynchronous communication, compared to Slack. If you engage in synchronous communication over Slack, then you're engaging in a relatively inefficient way to communicate synchronously compared to a telephone / video call or meeting. Furthermore, unless you sit in a formal meeting, you rarely have the knowledge base open in front of you to be edited as part of the meeting, thereby ensuring that the meeting produced something. If you allow synchronous communication to happen over Slack, then yes, that's searchable, but unless it happens in a public channel, it's not searchable by everyone, and Slack makes it too easy to screenshot discussion, promoting cover-your-ass behavior even for one-off statements made during "synchronous" discussion. In short, Slack is an anti-tool.