What’s better than limp? These companies have some ideas.

“I have an absolutely addictive personality,” says Ms. Kane, 29. Slack, with its signature mix of 24-hour chitchat, GIFs, serious work project updates and chit-chat, took over her life. “It was so tempting to always be there,” she says.

She transitioned from intern to full-time marketer in 2015 and the messages kept coming – until 2016, when her company closed with Slack. Her working day has improved dramatically, she says. These days, she usually logs into Doist’s internal message board in the morning to check for project updates, logs out, and writes and edits until lunch with little distraction.

In the years since Slack debuted in 2009, it has helped make instant messaging an essential part of white collar work. But many workers under siege found that it replaced email, never a beloved technology itself, with something even more distracting.

The use of Slack and other collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace increased during the pandemic. From January to April 2020, the average time Slack users were active on the platform increased from about 85 minutes to about 120 minutes per day, according to the latest earnings report. (The Wall Street Journal is a Slack client.) Microsoft Teams discovered a 72% increase in instant messages in March 2020, compared to a January-February 2020 baseline.

Still, some companies are pushing back the constant chat trend by reducing or even eliminating the expectation that there will be live chats and calls on the average working day. There are just too many messages.

The buzzword for the new way of communicating in these workplaces is asynchronous. Asynchronous communication refers to chats that are not happening in real time. It can include annotated documents, posts to message threads that don’t send notifications for every update, and yes, old-fashioned email. Synchronous communication refers to the rest: video calls, phone calls, chat apps and face-to-face conversations.

Doist, where Ms. Kane still works, has created an asynchronous culture after leaving Slack, said Gonçalo Silva, Portugal-based chief technology officer. The company designed its own internal communication platform called Twist, which organizes discussion threads on specific projects or topics rather than creating catchall, rapid-fire channels.

The company went one step further and also dropped the regular meetings. All conversations across the company are recorded and posted online.

Asynchronous teamwork also requires some individual changes. Ms. Kane has become accustomed to communicating deadlines well in advance. She rarely expects her 91 colleagues across 35 countries to be online at the same time.

Slack can in theory be used asynchronously – if the corporate culture, for example, allows for slow response times – but that rarely happens in practice.

The median response time for Slack users in 2020 was 16.3 minutes, according to productivity analytics company Time is Ltd., which analyzed an anonymized data set of 5,000 users around the world for The Wall Street Journal. For emails, the median response time was 72 minutes.

Slack has a number of features to make notifications more manageable, notes Noah Weiss, the company’s product vice president in San Francisco. These include the option to be notified only when people tag your name and a do not disturb mode.

Slack’s main innovation via email, he says, is that users can actively choose the channels most relevant to their work. On the other hand, he sees e-mail as all kinds of information that is pushed to employees. It’s hard to unsubscribe, he says, aside from measures like blocking senders.

A Microsoft spokesperson also points to features that promote asynchronous working on Teams, including setting “quiet hours” and “quiet days” and recording and transcribing virtual meetings.

As for the casual and social parts of Slack chats, many users find it particularly difficult to disconnect, Mr. Weiss: “We’ve never been [explicitly] aimed at trying to enable better social use of Slack, but we think it’s a good sign that we’ve developed a tool for work that people say makes the workplace more human. ”

Several companies have created their own asynchronous update platforms in recent years. Zapier, a company that allows users to sync web applications, has Async. Stripe, the fintech company, has Home. These platforms don’t have to move Slack entirely, but they can take over a number of functions. For example, by posting corporate policy updates on a dedicated page during the pandemic, it is no longer necessary to constantly answer HR questions in a high-traffic chat channel.

Whichever messaging platform you choose, making your workplace asynchronous requires making informed choices every step of the way, says John Meyer, CEO of Lemonly, an infographics design firm in Sioux Falls, SD, with 17 employees in three time zones in the US. When he decided to make his business more asynchronous a year ago, he instructed his team to write things out instead of having standard meetings. He also became an acolyte of Loom, a screen recording tool that allows you to record your computer screen or short videos of yourself.

“That was great for the two members of my team who went on maternity leave during the pandemic. They just recorded videos on how to do their job for the workers who took their place, ”he says.

Last summer, even Slack began developing an asynchronous video feature, still in pilot mode, Mr. Weiss.

Aside from these developments, there are still obvious uses for real-time communication, such as personnel disputes, tense work emergencies, and deadlines, not to mention hilarious observations with a short shelf life. It’s hard to imagine a company eliminating it altogether.

The key is to think carefully about chat boundaries, says Nir Eyal, the Singapore-based author of “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.”

He doesn’t see communication apps as inherently problematic, but thinks employees could be more aware of including them in their workday. “I encourage putting everything on an agenda, not just meetings – even the times of a day when you can check Slack,” he says.

“Group chat is like a bubble bath,” he says. “You have to go in and out, not sit all day.”

Write to Krithika Varagur at [email protected]