What’s better than slack? These companies have some ideas.

“I definitely have an addictive personality,” says Ms. Kane, 29. 29. Slack took over her life with his distinctive mix of 24-hour chat, GIFs, updates on serious work projects, and talks. “It was so tempting to be there all the time,” she says.

She switched from internal to full-time marketer in 2015, and the messages continued – until 2016. It was then that her business Slack ceased. Her workday has improved dramatically, she says. These days, she usually logs on to Doist’s internal message board in the mornings to check on project updates, sign out and write, and edit until lunch with few distractions.

In the years since Slack made its debut in 2009, it has helped cement instant messages as an important part of white-collar work. But many beleagured workers found that it replaced email, never a beloved technology itself, with something even more distracting.

The use of Slack and other collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace skyrocketed during the pandemic. From January to April 2020, the average time Slack users were active on the platform rose from about 85 minutes to about 120 minutes a day, according to its latest earnings report. (The Wall Street Journal is a Slack customer.) Microsoft Teams found a 72% increase in instant messaging in March 2020, compared to a January-February 2020 baseline.

However, some companies are pushing the ongoing chatting trend by expecting to have, reduce or even eliminate live chats and calls during the average business day. There are simply too many messages.

The buzzword for the new way of communicating in these workplaces is asynchronous. Asynchronous communication refers to chats that do not happen in real time. This can include annotated documents, posting on message threads that do not send notifications for every update, and yes, good old-fashioned email. Synchronous communication refers to the rest: video calls, phone calls, chat programs and a personal conversation.

Doist, where Mrs. Kane is still working, creating an asynchronous first culture after she stopped Slack, says Gonçalo Silva, the technical head of Portugal. The company has designed its own internal communication platform called Twist, which organizes discussion threads on specific projects or topics instead of creating a fast, fast channel.

Going a step further, the company also held regular meetings. Any industry-wide conversations are recorded and posted online.

Asynchronous teamwork also requires some changes. Mrs. Kane is used to communicating deadlines well in advance. She rarely expects her 91 colleagues spread across 35 countries to be online at the same time.

Slack can be used as a theoretical asynchronous – for example if the business culture accommodates long reaction times – but this rarely happens in practice.

The median response time for Slack users in 2020 was 16.3 minutes, according to productivity analysis firm Time is Ltd., which analyzed an anonymous data set of 5,000 users around the world for The Wall Street Journal. For emails, the median’s response was 72 minutes.

Slack has a number of features to make notifications more manageable, says Noah Weiss, vice president of the San Francisco company. This includes the option to be notified only if people mark your name and a disturbing mode code.

According to Slack, the most important innovation of Slack is that users can actively choose the channels that are most relevant to their work. He, on the other hand, sees email as all kinds of information sent to workers. It is difficult to withdraw it, he says, and includes measures such as blocking senders.

A Microsoft spokesperson also points to features that promote asynchronous work to Teams, including setting up ‘quiet hours’ and ‘quiet days’ and receiving virtual meetings.

As for the informal and social parts of Slack chats, many of which users find it particularly difficult to detach, says Mr. Weiss: ‘We have never [explicitly] focuses on using Slack better in the social environment, but we think it’s a good sign that we’ve built a tool for people who feel that the workplace is becoming more human. ”

Several companies have created their own platforms for asynchronous updates in recent years. Zapier, an enterprise that allows users to sync web applications, has Async. Stripe, the fintech company, has Home. These platforms do not have to move Slack completely, but they can take over some features. For example, by posting company policy updates on a dedicated page during a pandemic, it is not necessary to constantly post HR questions in a visiting channel.

Whatever your messaging platform, to make your workplace asynchronous, involves deliberate choices at every step, says John Meyer, CEO of Lemonly, an infographic design agency in Sioux Falls, SD, with 17 employees in three U.S. time zones. When he decided a year ago to make his company more asynchronous, he instructed his team to write things out instead of neglecting meetings. He also became an acolyte from Loom, a screenshot tool that lets you record your computer screen or short videos of yourself.

‘It was great for the two members of my team who went on maternity leave during the pandemic. They only recorded videos on how to do their job for the workers who took their place, ‘he says.

Last summer, even Slack started developing an asynchronous video feature, still in pilot mode, says Mr. White.

Apart from these developments, there are still clear uses for real-time communication, such as staff disputes, tense emergencies and deadlines, not to mention hilarious observations with a short shelf life. It’s hard to imagine a company eliminating it altogether.

The key is to be considerate about chat boundaries, says Nir Eyal, the Singapore author of “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.”

He does not consider communication apps to be inherently problematic, but thinks that workers may be more deliberate in incorporating them into their workday. “I encourage you to put everything on a calendar, not just meetings – even times on a day when you can check Slack,” he says.

“Group chat is like a hot tub,” he says. “You have to get in and out, not sit in it all day.”

Write to Krithika Varagur by [email protected]