An instant messaging app called "Slack" has become increasingly 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, yet 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 that I am increasingly "obsessed" with two principles of communication in the workplace: 1) Communication serves as a trackable train of thought. 2) Communication should be tied to an actionable outcome.
Communication needs to carry real meaning. 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 is probably better suited for quick notifications but not serious work. If there are too many random short feeds, 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 cannot get ourselves out of it.
Thinking about the reasons to use apps like Slack again, I also realized that there is another major difference between how we work as academic scholars/scientists versus how many companies function. I heard that industry often emphasizes teamwork. Each person is responsible for very specialized small steps—they are gears! Faster progress on a given project requires all team members to be on the same page and move together—parallel and synchronized action is the preferred way to improve operational efficiency. It requires something like the 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 solos." Here, "collaborative" means "let's collaborate when needed," but not real-time synchronization. The project leader (student or postdoc alike) is often the only one, 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 is happening on other people's plates because their next step of action is not dependent on another's immediate response. Therefore, we are in favor of "vertical" deep-dive communication—emails or even slower illustrator drawing boards—which 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 CC'ing a whole bunch of people every day. I know you would hate to be "CC'ed," wouldn't you? ;)