Kevin Kwok posted an excellent article a while back about The Arc of Collaboration. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but the main argument is that productivity and collaboration have always been handled as two separate workflows:
The problem, Kevin argues, is that productivity and collaboration shouldn’t be treated separately. Instead, they should go hand in hand and that’s exactly what a lot of the latest productivity tools do: Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc all have messaging natively built in to their apps.
While these functional workflows work great on their own, they are still separate silos between which you have to switch back and forth. The solution might be a meta layer on top of the productivity stack that works horizontally across all function workflows.
It’s not clear yet what exactly this meta layer would look like but it might be something similar to what Discord is to gaming.
I mostly agree with the points Kevin makes, but I see the role of Slack slightly different. While I don’t think that Slack will become the meta layer, I do think it came closer to that idea than people give it credit for.
Instead of Slack, I believe that email – and more importantly Superhuman – will return to become the center of gravity for productivity.
With more and more productivity apps creating their own messaging systems, users suddenly face a new problem: Multiple inboxes. You now have to check notifications in Github, Trello, Google Docs and half a dozen (if not more) other tools in your productivity stack.
Slack basically wants to be the unified notification center that captures all those incoming alerts from your productivity tools – a high frequency communications layer that ties everything together.
The way I see it notifications serve three important functions:
As Kevin points out in his article, Slack only really handles the “being notified” part. Whenever you want to take action on notifications you have to switch to whatever app you’ve received the notification from. Productivity and collaboration remain separate.
There are a few exceptions though: Slack does integrate pretty well with a couple of tools and allows you to manage certain tasks straight from within the app. You can close and reopen issues and pull requests from GitHub, for example. Or create Asana tasks. Or instantly reply to Intercom messages.
But Slack isn’t the perfect tool to manage notifications. Incoming alerts aren’t really bundled in one place but appear across different channels and between different messages. This makes it really hard to keep track of which notifications you have seen and which you have taken action on.
You need a single notification stream that allows you to treat notifications like tasks. Slack isn’t that. But you know what is? Email!