I have learned to really appreciate and enjoy Slack as a messaging tool. It's something I use daily, and a place where many inside my company communicate about all sorts of issues. There certainly can be an overload of channels, but for me, I add and prune channels regularly and it's a good way to segregate conversations.

I didn't feel that way when I started. At first, I resisted using it. Now I couldn't imagine not having it, but not everyone feels the same way. There's an article about a SaaS provider moving their company off Slack and instead using the Basecamp project management platform and keeping communications inside there.

Why? They say they have less meetings, less interruptions, less direct messaging, and more productivity.

Interesting conclusions. I certainly can see that some people might find Slack to be chatty, and there are definitely lots of channels devoted to non-work items. There can be a lot of unread channels from me, but I don't know that I think we would have less meetings without Slack. We have various work tracking and productivity tools

Personally, I don't have a lot of DMs, and I like that I can see unread channels , ignoring them when I'm busy and looking at them when I have time. I can also just mark as read when I want to declare thread bankruptcy.

I usually don't find Slack to be too intrusive to my day. I work fairly independently and asynchronously, as I'd expect many developers to work. I also don't know that it causes more meetings, at least not for me. There is a fairly high bar to opening a meeting and I find many people don't bother. Instead, we can have a discussion, in real time or across days, that deals with a topic.

What do you think? If you use Slack (or Teams/etc.) is this a drain on productivity or an enhancer? I think the latter.