WHY I BANNED SLACK AT MY COMPANY
Async-first communication increased deep work by 3x. The team hated it for 2 weeks. Then they never went back.
Real-time communication is the enemy of deep work. It creates an expectation of immediate response, which necessitates constant monitoring. This state of 'continuous partial attention' makes it impossible to solve hard problems.
So I did the unthinkable. I banned Slack.
We moved to a fully asynchronous model. Documentation first. Long-form writing. Code comments. Pull request descriptions. If it's urgent, call. If it's not, write it down and wait.
The withdrawal was painful. People felt disconnected. They felt 'slow'. But then the metrics came in. Pull request velocity up. Bug count down. And surprisingly, employee satisfaction up. People realized that the 'connection' Slack provided was just noise. Real connection comes from building great things together, not sharing GIFs.