Why?

How we communicate with each other deeply influences our ability to be productive as a team. By hearing and being heard in the right moments, we can do our best work and see its impact.

How we spend our time each work day defines how we feel about work. Our tools should give us superpowers, making us more focused, effective and productive. Anything that creates distraction, frustration or anxiety should be avoided.

Distracting or irrelevant interruptions paralyze our ability to focus on what’s most important in the moment and prevent us from reaching goals.

Communication tools should be energizing hubs that bring us into harmony around the work we do together, with just enough structure to keep us focused and moving forward.

The things we’re writing to each other in our communication tools are the most relevant of our written knowledge. The latest updates, most accurate data, and the most recent sentiments, all start in our communication before we move them elsewhere.

It’s difficult and inefficient to document everything. Some knowledge only exists in team archives, but it should be organized and easily found for future reference. When it’s clear that a piece of information should be available to everyone, we should record it in a more permanent location.

Our communication tool should allow for progressively more structure as a conversation evolves. When replies start to show a fork in the flow of thought, it’s important to move the conversation elsewhere to minimize noise, avoid interleaved thoughts, and make recall simpler.

We shouldn’t need to ask the same questions over and over again if the right answers are available. Rather than letting obscure knowledge get stuck in just a few heads, it should be easily findable by everyone and suggested to anyone asking similar questions.

Every conversation should have a purpose, and the most important are ones that enable us to move forward with confidence. We prioritize making good decisions and acting on them.

When we’re done with a conversation, it should get out of our way and let us move on quickly. Dormant conversations should be out of sight but easily available later if needed, keeping our mind relaxed and free of clutter.

Repetitive tasks that do not move us forward are just wasteful busy work. We should avoid habitual list scrolling, badge clearing, and box checking just to feel accomplished.

More communication is not always better, and shouldn’t be a measure of success [1]. We should communicate just enough to do great work and never to feel busy.

Having focus means more than just saying “yes” to something, it means saying “no” to everything else [2]. We must ignore unnecessary interruptions so we can focus on our most important work.

We’re only truly able to focus when we can relax in the confidence that we can catch up on what has happened without missing out on important information. This means organizing our communication well enough to avoid stray context.

By being intentional about when and what we communicate, we have more time and energy to work on what matters. We should make space for exploration and discovery, but it should be on our schedule and terms rather than forced on us when convenient for others.

As LLMs and language-based AI technology advances, interacting with AI agents in team chat will increasingly become a core part of our workflows rather than just a tacked on afterthought.

Just like people, AI agents need focused context to help them understand the problem at hand and how to respond. This requires a communication tool that lets you structure conversation around your work, rather than forcing you to work around its limitations.

By giving access to our full living knowledge base of communication cross-referenced with data in our connected apps, AI can immediately surface answers and insights that would take us hours or days to do on our own.

Fully embedding AI agents alongside our team and apps let’s us interact with them as we do our human colleagues, making team chat the common workspace for people and AI to coexist productively.