For years, email
was considered the scourge of business collaboration. Too many messages, endless discussion threads, a disastrous signal-to-noise ratio. And I was certainly not the last to point out the risks of information overload or its unsuitability for modern collaboration.
But what’s almost magical about the world of technology is that every time a technology shows its limitations, another one comes along to complement or even replace it, even if the problem is more about how it’s used than the tool itself.
We have therefore seen a flood of instant messaging tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat, which we wanted to see as miracle solutions. Faster, smoother, and more engaging, they had everything going for them and represented a break with the slowness and cumbersomeness of email.
But in reality, these tools have only led us into a new trap: that of perpetual conversation.
While email was asynchronous and sometimes cumbersome, chat introduced another form of overload: that of continuous, immediate communication that cannot be ignored or escaped. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, employees spend an average of 57% of their time in Microsoft 365 communicating (meetings, messages, emails), and only 40% working (Work Trend Index Annual Report – Will AI Fix Work?), if creating documents is considered working in the sense of creating value, but that’s another topic (Is creating documents really work?) . The channel has changed, but the saturation has remained the same or even intensified.
In short:
- Instant messaging tools such as Slack and Teams, which were supposed to replace email, have created a new overload linked to continuous communication.
- They promote a culture of constant responsiveness, which causes interruptions, stress, and loss of concentration.
- Chat, which is more oral than written, makes decisions unclear and hinders the structuring of information.
- The problem lies less with the tools than with poorly adapted organizations, where technology amplifies dysfunction.
- Hybrid use is preferable if working methods are not questioned: chat for operational tasks, asynchronous and structured tools for complex issues.
The illusion of responsiveness
Instant messaging has trapped us in a mindset of constant availability, and what was supposed to be a tool for agility has become a new source of inefficiency: responding quickly has become more important than responding well.
Our days are now punctuated by notifications, and even the slightest silence becomes suspicious. A message that doesn’t get an almost immediate response becomes a source of annoyance and provokes the manager’s anger. A culture of constant responsiveness generates stress and hinders concentration.
According to Microsoft, 68% of employees say they lack uninterrupted concentration time. This is a real warning sign: chat encourages interruptions, fragments time, and prevents what is known as deep work. It creates a kind of injunction to be available all the time and react instantly, which undermines the quality of work.
Chat is oral communication in disguise
If email is the modern heir to old-fashioned paper mail, chat is more a product of a culture of oral communication and discussion, from which it derives its name. At least it doesn’t hide behind a mask.
But while the former left traces that we tried to manage by filing and archiving, the latter established continuous communication that is sometimes lively but always ephemeral. Nothing is ever clearly stated or set in stone; we are in a permanent state of “work in progress” or, rather, “talk in progress.” Some see this as transparency, but few see clarity.
Decisions are made in discussion threads where they are lost in an endless stream of messages,key information is mixed in with trivial exchanges or can only be found in a link or screenshot, and a week later no one knows what was said, decided, why, or on what basis. And it’s even harder to find these elements again.
How often do we blame technology when, as always, it is not the problem, but merely a reflection of a culture that is ill-suited to modern work (Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work).
A growing organizational debt
The problem is not Slack or Teams, but the people who use them incorrectly (Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work):
“The problem with this trajectory is that no one asked whether it made sense to optimize this style of work. While Slack improved on aspects of email that were lacking at a time when message volume was high, it simultaneously amplified the frequency of these interactions.”
But also:
“The problem with this trajectory is that no one stopped to ask if it made sense to optimize this style of work in the first place. Though Slack improved the areas where e-mail was lacking in an age of high message volume, it simultaneously amplified the rate at which this interaction occurs.“
For a clear conclusion:
“The future of office work won’t be found in continuing to reduce the friction involved in messaging but, instead, in figuring out how to avoid the need to send so many messages in the first place.“
It’s not chat that’s the problem, but a totally inadequate work organization (Knowledge workers, the excluded from operational excellence? and Just because work is invisible, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved).
We are using tools for purposes for which they were not designed. Chat is a communication tool, not a way to compensate for a lack of work structure. It is not the problem, but rather a symptom of problems that are primarily cultural, organizational, and even managerial.
We think we save time by communicating faster, but this is a mistake because our time, attention, and cognitive abilities are finite: just because we circulate information faster and in greater quantities does not mean we have the time to make the right decisions based on that information, let alone execute them.
This brings me back to my theory on digital tools: they only enable us to do things faster and on a larger scale, and if we have a dysfunctional organization, we will dysfunction faster and on a larger scale. QED.
In this context, chat creates debt. Debt in terms of attention, clarity, and structure. This debt is compounded by every chat channel, every unsummarized exchange, and every unformalized decision.
According to the same Microsoft report, 62% of working time is spent searching for information, coordinating, or re-explaining. We spend more than half our time on secondary tasks, which is not only inefficient but absurd.
In the absence of structured processes and a culture of collaborative work, chat becomes a tool for disorganization that amplifies problems without solving anything.
Compared to email, we have gained momentum but certainly not progress.
Chat kills structured thinking
Formal writing (well-written emails, shared documents, summary notes) forces us to structure our thoughts, clarify our intentions, and take a position, whereas chat encourages impulsive reactions and responses rather than reflection, transforming collaboration into a series of comments with no clear decisions and no effort to understand a problem in its entirety.
This evolution comes at a cost: the quality of collective thinking. When everything is conversation, nothing is discussed; when everything is informal, decisions are never clear. Interacting is not proof of collective intelligence, and we should remember what we were taught in school when we were little: always think before you speak.
Unfortunately, knowledge work requires time, perspective, and reflection. Everything that chat takes away from us.
Towards hybrid use
Since the problem is not so much the tool as its use, and in the absence of the courage to really ask ourselves what operational excellence is, we can nevertheless try to establish some best practices, such as:
- Reserve chat for immediate operational matters, not for complex issues or sensitive decisions.
- Reintroduce asynchronous communication and structure: shared documents, reports, tickets, well-structured emails.
- Formalize rules of use: right to disconnect, notification-free periods, escalation to another means of communication after three exchanges on a given topic.
- Consolidation: regular summaries, capitalization in appropriate tools, clarification of decisions.
No one likes rules, but when the price of chaos is too high and we are unable to exercise individual and collective self-discipline, they become necessary.
And to the follow-up question of whether, instead of working better, we should wait for AI to solve all our problems, my answer is that AI can certainly help, but until we work better, it will only add noise to noise and speed to speed, and make things worse.
Bottom line
We thought we were modernizing work by replacing email with chat, but we replaced information overload with cognitive saturation (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden).
Chat is just a tool, and like any tool, it can amplify the worst if it is not properly managed. Progress will come from better control of our communication flows and a collective ability to sort out what deserves a quick exchange and what requires perspective and structure. Between perceived urgency and real importance.
Visual credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
