Insights
Ten-plus years after moving our chaos from email to Slack, chat channels, clear norms, and a little emoji discipline still keeps our team mostly sane.
There’s no doubt that email revolutionised the way we do business, connecting us with clients, colleagues, suppliers, and of course, the occasional online shopping temptation. But that sinking feeling when you open your inbox and see the endless list of unread messages? It’s enough to make anyone feel like a Dursley under a flurry of Hogwarts acceptance letters.
And then comes the triage: what to delete, what to skim, what needs a response right now (and what can definitely wait until after coffee). Somewhere between the “FYI” threads and the “urgent but not actually urgent” requests, productivity takes a nosedive.
For us, the tipping point came when our daily office chatter — ideas, reminders, priorities, and the all-important “who’s going out for lunch?” — started clogging inboxes faster than we could clear them. When everyone’s CC’d and everyone replies, chaos reigns.
That was back in 2014, when we stumbled across a little tool called Slack. We moved our conversations out of email and into channels: one for each client, project, and topic (plus one dedicated entirely to “lunch-money,” obviously). It instantly decluttered communication, made collaboration quicker, and prevented important messages from getting lost in digital noise.
Fast forward to 2025, and Slack, along with tools like Teams, Notion, and the various AI helpers we’ve added along the way, remains central to how we work. It’s no longer just about chatting; it’s our hub for brainstorming, approvals, quick polls, GIF therapy, and the occasional Friday meme-off.
Has it made us perfectly productive? Not quite. We still lose the odd afternoon to enthusiastic thread tangents and well-timed dad jokes. But compared to the days of endless email chains and forgotten attachments, it’s a world apart.
After ten years of using Slack, we’ve learned a few things:
- Clear channels keep conversations on track (and save your sanity).
- Emojis are a legitimate communication tool.
- Not every ping deserves an instant reply; boundaries matter.
- And yes, there will always be a “lunch” channel.
So here’s to a decade of better communication, fewer emails, more collaboration, and a little more calm amid the digital chaos. Slack might not make us perfectly productive, but it definitely keeps us (mostly) sane.