Is group chat making you sweat?

10. Chat reminds you that you’re behind. Group chat feels like you’re chasing something all day long. What’s worse, group chat often causes “return anxiety” — a feeling of dread when you’re away for a while and you come back to dozens (hundreds?) of unread lines. Are you supposed to read each one? If you don’t, you might miss something important. So you read up or skip out at your own risk. All the while you’re trying to piece together interleaving conversations that may refer to other things you haven’t seen yet. And just when you’re caught up, you’re behind again. It’s like your working two jobs — the work you’re supposed to do, and the work of catching up on what you missed that probably didn’t matter (but you won’t know until you read back).

I write a lot about communication. It’s something that is very important to me. There are a lot of good points about chatting in large groups of people (like in Slack). I totally agree with the points raised, but I think chat apps like Slack are doing well to actually cut down on noise in group chat, because not everything has to be sent to every person, but there’s still a lot of transparency in what messages are being sent where.

Slack also offers 1 on 1 chat, and ad-hoc small groups for chat, so it’s the best of all worlds when you want to communicate with a team or group of people.

> Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise — Medium