Slack, I’m breaking up with you

 

“Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Hey there, Slack. This won’t be easy, but it’s for the best.

As you and I both know, things started out so wonderfully. Me with my exploding inbox, you with your (very sexy) ambition to make email obsolete.

Only, I don’t know if we’re so good for each other, after all. Or, more to the point, I don’t know if firing up a relationship with you ever really fixed what was broken in my other one to begin with.

Everyone knows email and I had our issues. Email started as a frisky exploration into a whole new world and quickly escalated to a scale beyond anyone’s expectations. Next thing I knew, email and I had not only put a ring on it, we’d bought a minivan and moved into a little place in the suburbs.

Was it rushed? Sure. I think if we’d known just how big the relationship was going to become, email and I would have set things up very differently from the start. Still, a commitment’s a commitment, and we’d settled into a routine we could at least call our own.

Then, out of nowhere, here you come riding into my life like a goddamned Clint Eastwood straight out of Bridges of Madison County. The personality! The colors! You were all promises, rose petals, and sex appeal. And SO much more responsive to my needs.

Soon, we were messaging every day. It wasn’t long until it was hard to think of a time I’d ever gotten things done without you.

And that, really, was where things began to unravel for us.

Because, even though you’re one of the most enjoyable pieces of software I’ve ever jumped into bed with, I’m not sure you’re THE one, and that seems to be more and more of what you’re demanding these days.

Slack, you’re asking for a lot of my time

I may have been fooling myself when we were still in the honeymoon phase, but when there was all the talk of you killing email, I have to admit I thought it was the email problem you were attacking, not just the email platform.

You’re splitting my attention into a thousand tiny pieces

You’re actually making it HARDER to have a conversation

You’re turning my workdays into one long Franken-meeting

Lastly, you’re a bit on the possessive side

I’m sorry, but I need my space