An instant messaging app called “Slack” has become more and more popular among research labs. I was wondering what is the benefit of using it? While waiting for my grant proposal to be assembled and submitted, I read a little on the differences between Email and Slack.
These are two useful, while very different, communication tools. There is one major difference as described in this quote from the above article:
“Inboxes enable deep dives and give you time to think before replying. “Email is best for discussions where people might need or want more time to think about an issue, or if there’s a lot of information to convey,” says Noah. “
I prefer to write long emails recently 🙂 The reason behind this is I am more and more “obsessed” with two principles of communications in the working environment: 1) Communications serves as a trackable train-of-thoughts. 2) Communications should be tied with an actionable outcome.
Communication needs to carry real meanings. If not, don’t do it. Most of the information out there in modern social media is heavily fragmented and does not carry any deep meaning. As a result, social media-like short communication probably better suited for quick notification but not serious work. If there are too many random short feeds there, it is very unlikely people will take them seriously and read them. If nobody really cares about most of the messages out there, it defeats the purpose of communication. In many ways, we are sadly living in a modern world with a highly fragmented information swamp – we don’t really like it, but seemingly we also can not get ourselves out of it.
Thinking about the reason to use apps like Slack again, I also realized that there is another major difference between how we work as an academic scholar/scientist vs how many companies function. I heard the industry often emphasizes teamwork. Each person is responsible for very specialized small steps – they are gears! Faster progress of a given project requests all team members to be on the same page and move together – a parallel and synchronized action is the preferred way to improve operational efficiency. It requires something like Slack instant messaging system to “sync” everyone constantly. In contrast, in our academic environment, especially in our small lab, there are mostly individual explorers doing their collaborative “free solo”. Here the “collaborative” means “let’s collaborate when needed“, but not a real-time Syncro. The project leader (student or postdoc alike) oftentimes is the only, or among very few people, who needs to be in the communication loop. Most of the time, each project leader doesn’t necessarily care what’s happening on other people’s plates because their next step of action is not dependent on other’s immediate responses. Therefore, we are in favor of a “vertical” deep-dive communication – emails or even slower illustrator drawing broad – is actually a more efficient and more meaningful way to communicate. Think (deeply) before pipetting!
I guess I will start to think about using Slack once I start to cc’ing a whole bunch of people every day. I know you will hate to be “cc’ed”, won’t you 😉