Slack recently rolled out general availability of Slack Connect Direct Messages, to a storm of negative reactions. The feature, first announced in October, lets members of paid accounts invite other Slack users who belong to different organizations to swap direct messages. In other words, you can now send anyone a Slack message directly from your account, even if they are not part of the same Slack workspace as you. This is problematic, as I’ll explain.
As of now, the inviter must be part of a paid account and the invitee must actively accept the invitation. If someone invites you using your email address, the invitation comes by email, not by Slack. If the inviter knows the name of your Slack workspace and your username, they may be able to invite you directly through Slack, however.
After the rollout, users raised concerns about unwanted messages, so Slack disabled the ability to include a custom message with an invitation.
In a statement published by Mashable, Jonathan Price, VP of communications and policy at Slack said, “After rolling out Slack Connect DMs this morning, we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages.”
That’s an important fix, and I’m glad Slack made it. But you can still Slack someone an invitation they’ll receive via email. You shouldn’t—at least, not often.
Why not? After all, this new feature sounds a whole heck of a lot like email. Except, of course, it’s not. Nor should it be. There’s too much value in keeping email and Slack separate. While there are undoubtedly some cases where this new option makes sense, in all but the most selective cases, it’s a terrible idea. Treating Slack like email or a replacement to email takes away one of its greatest assets: It’s not email. It’s a different communication tool with unique strengths. Maintaining these distinctions has benefits for your productivity and well-being at work.
Too Much Streamlining Is Just as Bad as None
Being able to start a direct message with anyone from within your Slack account strikes me as a move toward streamlining your tools. In covering software for more than a decade, I’ve heard this rally cry before: Consolidate your workspace! Centralize your software! The thinking is that we are more productive the more we eliminate app-switching. If you can do all your tasks in one app, isn’t that the epitome of efficiency?
In short, no. Some amount of segmentation is highly beneficial. As human beings, we sort, organize, compartmentalize, and raise boundaries all over the place. It’s how we make sense of the world. What happens when the pendulum swings too far in the direction of streamlining and consolidating is that we end up in a place with an enormous variety of tasks and information instead of one focused set.
On the flip side, some amount of separation and segmentation, such as discrete apps for managing certain kinds of work in this case, helps us focus on one thing at a time. That’s why closing email when you’re trying to work on anything other than email is productive.
Segmenting Communication Benefits You
Communication tools, in particular, have a few unique benefits when you use them in a segmented way. To illustrate the point simply, I’ll use some examples of how it applies on personal level.
For years, I’ve advocated using multiple email accounts to make email more productive. If you dedicate one email account to online shopping and nothing else, then it’s really easy to never get distracted by shipping confirmations or coupon codes when you’re trying to manage messages related to business, personal finance, socializing, or anything else. This kind of separation allows you to stay completely logged out of your shopping account until it’s time for shopping. Being able to focus on the information you need when you need it is crucial to being productive, especially with email. When unnecessary and potentially distracting messages are in another account, you can better achieve that focus.
Using different email accounts for different purposes has other benefits, too. For example, it’s incredibly easy to spot a phony email supposedly from your bank if you’ve never given your bank the address you use for online shopping.
Most of us already segment our communication without thinking too much about it. You might chat with close friends and family via text, international friends via WhatsApp, acquaintances in Facebook Messenger, privacy-concerned colleagues and friends on Signal, and so forth. It’s not especially hard. Very often, it happens organically.
Obviously, these are examples of segmentation on a personal level. How does it apply in a business context? I’ll explain.
Slack and Email Each Have Value
In the early days of Slack, there was a tendency for analysis to declare the app as an email-killer or go on about how Slack would replace email. What benefits workers most, however, is to think about email and Slack as different tools, each with unique value.
Email offers us a place to receive unsolicited messages, communicate with people outside our organization (as well as inside when it makes sense), and write at length. And email is better when we aren’t overloaded by messages that don’t need to be emails.
Slack became popular, in part, because it made sense to siphon off a large number of messages that might previously have been emails to a new place. The result? Email traffic is much lighter, making it easier to deal with. And in-house messages can take on a different tone, length, and level of transparency with all the options for putting them into different channels and DMs. Even within Slack, think of how much segmentation occurs through having channels and threads. Separating and sorting conversations is what Slack is all about.
When Do Slack Connect DMs Make Sense?
This new feature, Connect Direct Messages, could cause a headache if people start to pull in too many conversations that are better left in email. Do you want someone outside your organization to be able to message you in the same way and with the same sense of urgency that anyone else in Slack can?
Remember, the only people who can message you in Slack are part of a highly restricted group. That’s crucial to your productivity and your well-being at work. It allows you to work with Slack open so that you only receive urgent messages from the select group, while closing email and temporarily silencing anyone who doesn’t have that privilege. If you start letting people into Slack who don’t belong there, then the privilege is meaningless.
Granted, there must be cases where using this feature makes sense, even if they are few and far between. It must be someone:
- Whom you want to be able to message you with some urgency
- Who’s outside your organization
- Who can’t be bothered joining your team’s Slack account as a guest
Slack and Email Are Best Left Separate
I am an unabashed proponent of Slack and other team messaging apps. There’s value in the more concise format that it nudges people toward, compared with email. Slack does a phenomenal job of giving people control over their notifications. If you want to get an alert about new messages from certain people or certain channels after hours, you can, but it’s not a requirement. Search works well, threads work well. I could go on.
Unlike email, where anyone can send you a message if they get their hands on your address, Slack lets you only interact with a limited group of people. Think long and hard about where and how you want people to be able to reach you before inviting them to a Slack Connect DM. It could blur some of the beneficial lines you have that segment your communications.
