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Can your team survive without Slack? 

Slack is as ubiquitous as the fax machine and the printer were in the office of the ‘90s. Workers have even gone so far as to turn down a job offer if the company uses Microsoft Teams instead. But some tech leaders are starting to wonder if the emoji-filled messaging tool is getting in the way of real work.

• “In the early days, it was fun, pre-pandemic. Post-pandemic, it’s become so exhaustive in terms of one’s own time, productivity, well-being, etc., because there’s just this constant need to get back to people,” says Vivek Sodera, co-founder of the $30-a-month email tool Superhuman.
• Abe Winter, founder of the early-stage book meetup app Klerb, wrote a blog post in 2018 criticizing Slack as allowing “your worst people to overwhelm your best” by interrupting and distracting them.
• The challenge is that Slack has bad “message discipline,” Winter told Protocol, which leaves users needing to read every message in a channel in order to monitor it for information that might be important to them.

Slack knows you’re stressed. Slack’s VP of product, Ali Rayl, has admitted that overwhelm is a real problem when it comes to the product, and the company is constantly iterating to improve.

• “What have we done with the visual presentation of Slack activity that's making people stressed out?” Rayl asked in a June interview. “How can we change that visual presentation to just lower the temperature a little bit?”
• Spokesperson Lauren McDevitt pointed out in an email to Protocol that the app is customizable to different work styles.
• Users wanting a quieter experience can pause notifications, set Do Not Disturb hours and limit the channels shown in the sidebar.

Use Microsoft Teams because it’s boring. Amal Dorai, a partner at Anorak Ventures who spent over six years at Microsoft after it bought his collaboration software startup LiveLoop, said there’s an upside to Microsoft Teams’ relative unpleasantness.

• “People get in and get out, said Dorai. “You need to send a message to someone about some service being down and you send it. You don’t go and hang out and talk about your weekend and stuff.”

Read the full story on Protocol.com.