Slack’s importance is inversely tethered to the rate at which functional workflows within companies become legible and systematized. Both at an operational level, and long term at the meta-strategic level.

We’ve been given no shortage of digital tools that should, in theory, help us work better, with more focus and efficiency, and connect us more easily with our colleagues. Instead, email, instant messaging, remote-meeting apps, work-flow and project-management software and so on can feel like so many buckets with holes in the bottom, maddeningly in

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The problem with ‘productivity’ is that it is concerned with managing and increasing output: producing widgets, quarterly reports, the next release of the software, yet another research report, and meanwhile, always aspiring to do more with less. Less waste, less idle time on the assembly line, and fewer workers. The end game is to speed up the mac... See more