I typically have Gmail open with Chat and Slack. My team also has Gmail Chat but we find it easier to organize conversations, files, etc with Slack. It let's us

I typically have Gmail open with Chat and Slack. My team also has Gmail Chat but we find it easier to organize conversations, files, etc with Slack. It let's us have a channel for each project, a scrum channel for what everyone's working on, direct messaging when you need it, etc. Uploading files from Dropbox and other integrations like Github are also useful.