I’m seeing this sentiment about Slack quite a bit these days:

Am I the only person who feels like Slack has turned into an even less controlled, one-more-thing-to-check, inbox?

— Craig Mod (@craigmod) June 2, 2015

I am now on nine Slacks and I get DMs in all of them and this is rapidly becoming untenable

— Erin Kissane (@kissane) June 2, 2015

This is such an interesting side effect of being successful. Slack is an amazing product, and the way they’re building it is nothing short of remarkable. From their launch strategy to the way they keep innovating, it’s a wonderful case study.

But now something else is happening. Slack is so successful that public groups have exploded, and it’s not uncommon for people to switch between 5 or more Slack accounts during any given day. I think we’re now learning that the thing that makes Slack so useful also requires it to remain a relatively small part of one’s workday.

Slack is a great communication tool, with integrations that make it possible to reduce the amount of time spent on other services. But once you have multiple accounts and multiple rooms to contend with every day, it has the potential to become worse than that technology we all love to hate—email. At least with email there’s an assumption of asynchronous communication. With Slack there’s always an expectation to get an answer immediately, so the stress it induces can really skyrocket out of control.

What a predicament. This is a product that is incredibly useful, but that needs a relative measure of quietness to remain so. This means that explosive growth actually hurts its utility. What an interesting design problem to solve…