5 Reasons Your Team Should Quit Email, Text, & IM and Slack Instead

Slack is a More Efficient way for Teams to Communicate

If 18 months ago you had told me that my team would no longer need email, text messaging, or instant messaging to communicate with each other, I would have thought you were crazy. No IM, maybe. But no email and text? No way. Yet here we are, with no need of those tools anymore. And it’s all because of Slack.

Coworkers thinking and talking

In this post I’ll explain what Slack is and how my team uses it. Then I’ll share 5 reasons why I recommend it for your team, too.

Background on Slack

Slack is a cloud-based communication tool. It allows teams or other small groups to communicate with each other, typically by sending short messages to the whole group, subsets of the group, or individuals in the group.

Take my team’s use of Slack, for instance. There are 7 of us on the team. Within Slack, we have a number of “channels” of communication. One is a “general” channel. We are all members of that channel. Any messages we post there are received by all 7 of us.

Other channels are for projects that only involve a subset of the members of our team. Only those members of our team involved in that project are on that channel. Only they receive messages shared on that channel.

Finally, there is a private channel between each of the members of the team for direct messaging one another.

5 Reasons to Use Slack

1. More Succinct than Email

Slack has greatly reduced the number of emails my team sends one another. Productivity guru Michael Hyatt calculates that his team’s implementation of Slack reduced his email by 83% in less than a week.

Even more importantly, messages sent in Slack tend to be shorter than messages sent by email. A random sample of 30 emails my team sent before Slack vs. a random sample of 30 messages we’ve sent via Slack shows that the Slack messages contained, on average, 73% fewer words than the emails.

I think we use fewer words in Slack messages because Slack is less formal than email. Whatever the reason, using Slack saves my team time because there are just fewer words to digest.

2. Easier to Reply to than Text Messages

When you receive a text message on your phone, it’s easy enough to reply if your response is short.

But there isn’t an easy way to reply if your response is somewhat long. It’s clumsy to peck out a long reply on your phone. Even replying by voice dictation, though very helpful in this regard, is still cumbersome due to the number of corrections you often have to make to voice dictation mistakes.

With Slack, you can often avoid these problems. That’s because when a message comes in, you receive it not only on your phone’s Slack app but on your computer as well. As a result, you can reply to messages very efficiently using your computer’s keyboard.

3. Like Instant Message, but Works Well on Your Phone

In my experience, instant message clients tend to work well on computers but poorly on phones.

With Slack, however, the experience is good (and almost identical) on computers and phones alike.

4. Replaces Email, Text Messaging, and IM within Teams

Due largely to the three foregoing considerations, my team no longer needs email, text messaging, or IM to communicate with one another.

We still use email with those outside our team, but rarely within our team. We tend to text within the team only when a message is urgent and team members don’t reply immediately to a Slack message. Slack has fully replaced IM within our team.

5. Robust Search Capabilities

“Slack” is an acronym which stands for “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge.” As the acronym suggests, all messages sent within your Slack group are searchable for easy retrieval. The free version of Slack (which is what my team uses) saves—and therefore allows you to search—up to 10,000 of your team’s most recent messages.

You may be accustomed to search functionality within your email and IM clients, but probably not within text messaging. The real power of search within Slack comes when you replace email, IM, and text messaging with Slack. When you do that, querying within Slack allows you to search what amounts to all of your team’s communication. That’s obviously a very efficient way to retrieve a conversation.

How to Get up and Running on Slack Quickly

Those new to Slack sometimes find the install and set up confusing. I created a step-by-step guide to help you quickly create an account and install it on your computer and phone. Get my free quickstart guide here:

{{Privy:Embed campaign=236279}}

Conclusion

Given my use of email, text messaging, and IM, the last thing I was interested in was another communication tool. But I love productivity, and leaders in that area that I trust—like Michael Hyatt—recommended Slack. So I invited my team to give it a try. After a month, we weren’t sure we liked it. After another month, there was no turning back.

Question: If you’ve used Slack, what do you think of it? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

If you liked this post, why not join the 5,000+ subscribers who receive blog updates on how to have more time and money for what matters most? Sign up here.

Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.

6 thoughts on “5 Reasons Your Team Should Quit Email, Text, & IM and Slack Instead

  1. Have you tried Basecamp? I’ve been implementing it with my teams and I’ve found it immensely helpful. Similar options for messaging and great collaborative project management.

    • I haven’t tried Basecamp but hear good things about it. I knew it was a project management tool but didn’t think of it as similar to Slack in terms of communication. Have you used Slack? If so, would you recommend using both Slack and Basecamp or just one? I don’t believe Basecamp has a free version, so to choose it above Slack, I’d think the project management component would have to be the motivating factor.

  2. Did you know you can also send emails from Slack, with those outside your team for example?
    Following your last point, “Robust Search Capabilities”, by bringing your emails (but also Twitter and Facebook if you want) in Slack, all your conversations are centralized in one place.
    If this sounds interesting, you should have a look at our bot, MailClark: https://mailclark.ai/help

  3. I tried it. It pinged too much and forced me to remove myself from every group. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, too many false alarms and you just start ignoring all of it. I was back to email, text and voice.

    • Hi Jason, thanks for thoughts based on your experience. If you try it again — and if you didn’t do this the first time around — you can configure notifications a fair bit in the File/Preferences menu.

Comments are closed.