Slack is bad for thinking
Todd M. Gureckis ¡ ¡  4 minutes to readOver spring break, I've been using AI tools to help me go through several hundred thousand email messages to find important ones and get rid of junk. AI might not be solving ground-breaking problems in Physics or Biology yet, but it is pretty good at email.
As I was in my old archives and feeling nostalgic, I read some of the emails that I sent to my advisor while I was getting my PhD. In the early 2000s, email was the primary way that Brad Love and I would communicate about projects. During the week, I would send updates about data collection or analysis questions I had. Viewed through my current lens, these messages are long, sometimes dragging on for several pages of printed text. Brad would reply in several different locations in one message, and the reply chains would get more and more complicated, and then they would be cut back to the most important conversation points until we resolved things.
It's been a long time since I have had a research collaboration that focused entirely on email. It seems like most research work now happens with Zoom or on Slack.
I remember distinctly when this shift happened in my own lab. There was some point where my lab group grew to a certain size, and I was getting bombarded with email. I started playing with Slack and suggested to students that this was a better way to communicate with me. I favored the immediacy of text messages and the conversational nature. Also, email was slowly degrading as a service as spam, administrative messages, and unending small requests started to overflow my inbox mixing with my scientific work in a distracting way[1]. Slack was blissfully simple in those early days and seemed a better place to hang out and do research.
But there are several things that struck me looking at those old messages.
đ¤ Thinking â
When I look at the cognitive content of those old messages, they seem a little more thought out, planned, and considered than I even would have predicted. As I was reading, memories came back about writing those messages, and they were sometimes major projects. I had to assemble my best arguments in the email and I would re-read it several times to make sure I was making my point in a clear way. Often in that editing I would recognize a flaw or gap in my thinking and change my approach.
It took a lot of time and effort to write and read these messages. Perhaps that was part of my original enthusiasm for Slack â it made things feel less difficult and also happened faster, which seemed better. The new way. Email was for old people and slow.
I have to admit, however, that the back and forth over email with proper sentences and paragraph level arguments prepared me well for the process of doing journal rebuttals and reviews. I was used to sitting down and thinking by writing for many hours as just a part of the research process.
đ§ Memory â
Another observation is that it's really nice to go back and read through those conversations. I can see the ideas developing, my excitement about a result, and doubts I had about project directions. There's even unexplored research ideas just sitting in these emails that we didn't have the time for. Email was the original second brain/Obsidian vault.
Slack seems to preclude that kind of review for me. I find it hard enough to search Slack to resurrect a conversation I had last week let alone find a thread about a specific project. It requires discipline to keep things organized in logical channels (and this requires both participants to agree to do this, unlike email which you can file into personal folders). Increasingly, conversations are broken across multiple workspaces intermixed with office chatter. Also, I'm talking about reading emails from 20 years ago. What are the odds that Slack will let you read your 20-year-old conversations in 2046 for free?
Slack is bad for thinking â
This all lead to a realization that perhaps Slack is bad for thinking[2]. Was my aversion to email wrong? I felt the draw of easier to read messages, that only require đ as a response, was an advantage for my work. But maybe it is an advantage for working quickly, but not for thinking.
Email is very different way to collaborate on ideas, a big set of thoughts can come at once, instead of watching the đŦ of a person working out an idea in real time. Chat is notorious for wasting your time[3]. You can read a long email on the train (well, in NYC) quietly and then craft a response later with some time to think and consolidate between.
Fostering a culture of thinking â
You really do need to choose your technologies carefully when doing cognitively demanding work. There is the famous essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" by Edward Tufte that was a criticism of the way that PowerPoint had replaced written memos in many organizations (and might have contributed to the Challenger explosion). This extends to the production of knowledge as well as consumption. I think what I observed in my old emails was more about how writing required more thinking from me.
I suspect "email for research discussions" would be a muscle we would need to strengthen again. Not only that, but I'm not sure if I could get buy in from collaborators if I just said "I'm not discussing research on Slack anymore." [4]
Writing effective emails is itself an art and requires certain conventions. Part of the issue, back when I gave up on using email for research, was that some people wrote poorly or were disorganized, and it was hard for me to wade through what they were saying and how I could help. (I'm sure people felt the same receiving my emails at times too.) It seems there would be a learning curve to re-establish how best to do this.
In the end, I really believe writing is really the most effective, and perhaps only, form of complex thinking. Researchers need to think more. Long live email? Dare we kill the culture of Slack?
This has actually been improved somewhat as AI based filtering has gotten pretty good at keeping your mail organized. âŠī¸
When Slack started to spread in popularity there were people who really argued against its model, using many of the arguments I am making here. I just ignored them. âŠī¸
Hours can go by in a chat in what would be a 5-minute phone call because the person you are talking to could get up to make lunch leaving you waiting for the next turn of the conversation. âŠī¸
It might help to mention (esp. to trainees) that many of the most productive scientist I know refuse to use Slack. I've never deeply discussed their reasons, but I bet these factors might come up. âŠī¸