As we've been growing the team at Parq, my attention has increasingly been spread thin. Growing the team has introduced more people to communicate thoughts to, more tools to communicate with, and increased the need for me to have a personal framework for communication. Slack does not punish you for sending out a long form thoughts broken up over 5 messages and 16 minutes. In fact, it punishes the people at the other end of the channel. Upwards of 3 - 5 notifications will roll in for what is really a single thought. This is why email has become my favorite method for sharing thoughts and collecting long form feedback from our team.

Email encourages you to write out all thoughts in a unified message. Generally, I find that I consider what I am about to send more than 10x as long as I would communicating the same thought via chat. The thought or request gets refined several times before I hit the send button; clarifying the core message just as much to writer as reader. For me, email makes communication proactive, rather than reactive. There is no race to beat "person x is typing" to get your thought out first. I would bet that readers of email generally consider your message more than they would a chat message, driving more thoughtful discussion.

If you are in a position that requires you to communicate or collect feedback from a team, I recommend spending a week defaulting to email for long form, less time sensitive communications.