The desire to have your employees fully connected to all the latest communication tools is killing productivity. Who even has time to look at Facebook at work anymore?

Moreover, if you didn’t see this coming, well, then you’ve been hiding in a closet for the last ten years. Also, I bet your organization doesn’t have a communication protocol for where to share your electronic words, thoughts, documents, and what types of communication are appropriate for email vs. chat vs. text — just saying.

We have too many applications that share communications with clients, prospects, coworkers, and information systems. There’s email (not dead yet), then there’s Slack, Hangouts, WhatsApp, Teams, Workplace, Text, and more. Phones? They’re dead.

Even though email is utilized less and less nowadays, it still has a significant positive over other forms of communication. You can consume all of your emails in one location of your choosing. You can choose your favorite email program or application, and you know that something sent from another program will arrive.

There are many great benefits to chat programs too, which extend well beyond the original use case. I use the integrations for Slack to keep me slightly more efficient. However, the big negative is that you have to consume any chats on the application where the message has been sent, unlike email. Moreover, everyone has their preference, which means I end up running Slack, WhatsApp, Hangouts at all times and sometimes others.

Oh, how I wish I could go back to the old days where I used Trillion to consume all my Google, AOL, IRC, and other early day chats in one spot. Not anymore.

Back to my point.

Keeping up with all of these modes of communication has become a disturbance to productivity, especially when using apps like Slack, think about the time you’re waiting for a response, staring at a screen telling us the person is still “typing.” How can you restart your tasks while you know someone is typing?

According to Rescue Time, daily usage of chat has gone up, and email has gone down from 2013 to 2019 since Slack launched. Here are the changes from 2013 to 2019:

– Chat: 1.0% to 5.2%
– Email: 13.6% to 10.4%
– Voice: 1.8% to 0.6%
– Calendar: 0.5% to 0.7%
– Video: 0.1% to 0.5%
– Other: 1.1% to 1.2%

Alternatively. The very software designed to make our days more productive has definitely increased the speed, quality, and quantity of information that we are consuming during the workday.

Is it making our days more productive? No.

Has it replaced or repaired our relationship with email? No.

Next steps for organizations. Define your vision for each tool. It may be that Slack is your way to keep external clients connected with your business development team and email where you internally craft (and document) strategic plans for growing each client. Evaluate and eliminate tools that aren’t within the organization’s mission. Moreover, provide standards that describe where it’s appropriate to share different types of information and hold conversations regarding that topic. For example, I wouldn’t support texting financial reporting changes or strategic planning for products development. Neither do I recommend emails asking, “do you have a minute?”

In every organization, communication is critical, and the recipe for efficient communications is more complicated than adopting the latest tool that claims to bring efficiencies to everyone.