Cal Newport

It's distracting, it's context switching, you can't do anything deep, it's hard to produce value.

But if that's the way you're going to work,

Email clients are not a very good tool for that.

You have threads and it's clunky and it's hard to search through your email and find what you did before.

So Slack came along and said, look, if this is the way you're going to work, hyperactive hive mind, constant back and forth, ad hoc coordination, we'll build you a better tool for that.

So that's why people both love and hate Slack.

It's a really good tool for that style of collaboration.

It works really well, but that style of collaboration makes us miserable.

So it's this weird love-hate relationship we have.

Like, this works great.

I hate the thing that is making it easier.

Because our brain isn't meant to switch our target of attention that quickly.

It just takes us a long time if we're talking about targets that are abstract and symbolic.

It takes us a long time to switch from one to another.

Physical world targets, we can switch quickly, right?

We're wired for that.

If there's a tiger's roar...

I can, boom, 100% attention what's going on over there.

But when we're thinking about abstract things, information, ideas, things that are symbolic and in our head, that's us.

We're basically reappropriating our brain hardware to do something we're not evolved to do.