Slack and other workplace messaging services undermine their goal of increased productivity by becoming distractions, where users are constantly chatting
Job software like Teams, Slack, and Workplace were supposed to make us more productive. They haven't. — Several people are typing. Tweets: @mostafanageeb , @bdsams , @cebsilver , @howelloneill , @annehelen , @manukumar , @ranimolla , @dcseifert , @adamsinger , @mattyglesias , @jessicagolds , @ezraklein , @waltmossberg , @mims , @recode , and @ranimolla Tweets: Mostafa Nageeb / @mostafanageeb : Use Google Chat. It is not good to the level that you will stop chatting. http://twitter.com/... Brad Sams / @bdsams : Hey you, stop talking to your co-workers...no social, no fun..work more. Gifs responsible for 54% less productivity. PRODUCTIVITYYYYY - *dies in a fire hell hole*. http://twitter.com/... Curtis er dd allerede / @cebsilver : it's like you've never been in a break room http://twitter.com/... Patrick Howell O'Neill / @howelloneill : the only sane choice is to mostly ignore Slack and mute the channels which complicates remote work because it's almost the only way to actually interact with co-workers http://www.vox.com/... Anne Helen Petersen / @annehelen : does Slack make publishing a story/communicating directly with my editors easier? of course! but it also creates a compunction — esp. for someone who works remotely — to constantly “show” you are working: http://www.vox.com/... Manu Kumar / @manukumar : Slack without rules is chaos and a waste of time. Slack with the right rules and culture can be productive. How you use Slack matters a lot and it's too easy to not use it the right way and difficult to actually use it well. The product could do more to help this. http://twitter.com/... Rani Molla / @ranimolla : One reason it's hard to fix workplace software issues: “It's not about setting rules, it's about what management is modeling, what it's rewarding,” @sarahcuda said. “People take cues from CEOs, what they say and don't. Most employees see what work gets rewarded and follow.” Dan Seifert / @dcseifert : everything in this article is just too Extremely Real https://getpocket.com/... Adam Singer / @adamsinger : This was long winded/unpersuasive. Is email ruining our jobs and lives? Are cell phones? What about internal company boards which have existed forever. You see how silly this is right? Any comms tools can be productive or a timesuck it's all how it's used. https://www.vox.com/... Matthew Yglesias / @mattyglesias : In which @ranimolla solves the Solow Paradox — productivity apps are breaking our minds instead of making us more productive. https://www.vox.com/... Jessica Goldstein / @jessicagolds : “Faster isn't good or bad, better or worse. Faster is just faster. If you're sending a lot of stupid messages faster, that's not great.” https://www.vox.com/... Ezra Klein / @ezraklein : And here's a killer piece from @ranimolla on one of my favorite topics: How Slack entered our offices promising to cut email and make everyone more productive, and instead it's become a hellscape of chatter that makes it harder to ever escape work. https://www.vox.com/... Walt Mossberg / @waltmossberg : Really deep, thorough, story about the disastrous impact of Slack and its imitators on productivity and the quality of work. But you won't get through it, and learn something new, unless you ignore Slack for awhile. Great job by @ranimolla. https://www.vox.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : I was on one of the very first teams to use Slack. It was essential for building our little startup. But there's a reason I was also one of the first people to abandon Slack and start telling people it's bad for productivity and even sanity http://twitter.com/... @recode : Consider this: after an interruption, it takes about 23 minutes to get back to the task at hand. Now think about how many Slack pings you get in a day. @ranimolla examines how productivity software can negatively impact your work: http://www.vox.com/... ... http://twitter.com/... Rani Molla / @ranimolla : Communication seems like a good thing until you have too much of it. It's so easy to communicate with job software like Slack, Teams and Google Hangouts and Meet that we're posting more messages than any one person can read. http://www.vox.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 Vox piece lands mid-arc in a debate that kept developing: Slack was sold as the connective tissue of work, but coverage since has documented what the tool actually does instead. A month after this ran, an analysis argued Slack was never becoming the 'central nervous system' of workflows at all — just filling cracks left by real productivity software (filling cracks rather than fixing them).
The later record shows the distraction problem was only one facet. As usage soared through the pandemic, lawyers reported rising harassment claims tied to informal, misread messages (an uptick in harassment claims), researchers compared chat's effect on workplaces to social media's effect on public discourse, and by 2021 The Atlantic reframed the whole story: Slack flattened corporate communication hierarchies, largely to employees' benefit.
First-order effects
- Companies that adopted Slack, Teams, and Workplace for efficiency gains are getting the opposite in part: always-on channels where constant chatting competes with the actual work, hitting individual output and managers' attention budgets first.
- Employees gain something the productivity pitch never advertised — an informal, low-friction channel to colleagues — which is why adoption persists despite the distraction cost.
Second-order effects
- Legal exposure follows usage: with messaging more casual and easily misinterpreted than email, harassment claims rise, pushing employers toward policies and monitoring over chat platforms they deployed for speed.
- Management loses narrative control of its own tools — in newsrooms, Slack became an organizing space journalists used to criticize leadership collectively, forcing executives to respond to internal pressure their own software enabled.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, workplace chat consolidates as the de facto social and political layer of the organization — flattening hierarchies, generating new liability categories, and forcing vendors like Salesforce-owned Slack to bolt structure back on top (task lists, AI assistants, agent integrations) to recapture the productivity promise the original product undermined.
The trend: Workplace chat is drifting from a productivity tool into the ambient social infrastructure of organizations, with vendors retrofitting structure and AI onto a medium whose core behavior — constant conversation — is the problem.