> 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 w

> 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.