Chat: A Procrustean Bed for Conversations

Ten years ago — and for many years before that — I worked at companies where the entire organization, or at least each team, sat in the same office, on the same floor, or at least in the same building.

When someone needed something urgently, they walked over to the right person. That person had to stop what they were doing, switch their attention to the request, and help immediately. It might have been a little annoying, but it was efficient. We understood that we should not interrupt each other over something that could wait. But when someone made the effort to come to your office, that effort had to be rewarded. You were expected to help.

You usually knew whom to ask, but you could also walk into a room and say, “Morning, everyone. Sorry to bother you, but I need help with something”. You knew who was present and who had heard your question, so the answer you received was not simply from the fastest person to respond. It was effectively an answer from the entire team — even if the rest of the team remained silent.

For me, that experience could almost justify the argument for “returning to the office”. But today, the office is often something very different. It may simply be a place where a random selection of employees sits while their luckier teammates work from home and the rest work from another office. This is where workplace messengers started to shine. Slack offered companies a polished way to stay connected and created the feeling of efficient remote communication. It also introduced a new collection of problems.

Chat Means “Live”

Chat rooms and instant messengers create an expectation of immediate communication. Even when the sender does not require an immediate response, the format itself suggests that the conversation is happening live.

The effort required to bother someone is now negligible. You do not need to walk into another room to ask a question. You can send it immediately. Is the question urgent? Send a message. Is it not urgent? You will probably send a message anyway.

Before workplace chat, you might have written an email or held the question until you saw the person in the corridor. But remote and partially remote teams no longer have those corridors. Email may not even be treated as an accepted channel for communication between colleagues.

So people send messages about everything. Any message could theoretically be urgent. Even when your conscious mind learns to ignore notifications, your subconscious does not necessarily do the same. In the same way that repeated interruptions make sleep less restorative, endless notifications make focused work less effective.

Eventually, people feel that the only way to stay focused is to turn off notifications and ignore the red circle next to the application icon — especially when the volume of communication becomes overwhelming. Usually, they are right to ignore it. Most messages can wait. Some do not concern them at all. Others appear in channels they joined simply because they might need them someday. But what happens when a message really is urgent?

When Everything Looks Urgent

To protect their productivity and mental health, people are forced to develop a tolerance for notifications. That creates another trap in a chat-first communication environment: they may ignore something that genuinely should not be ignored.

There is no clear way to escalate a message that has already triggered the same notification and the same red circle as every other message. Calling may feel excessive or awkward. You cannot walk over and ask the question in person. You send another message and wait.

In synchronous communication tools, most incoming messages are presented as roughly equal. You can mute some company-culture channels or suppress the least important notifications, but the remaining communication still arrives through the same interface and demands attention in much the same way.

In a traditional office, the format signaled urgency. A phone call meant one thing. A face-to-face interruption meant another. A conversation started over lunch carried a different expectation. An email could wait until later. Each method had its own implied level of urgency.

When instant messaging is used for conversations that do not require an immediate answer, genuinely urgent messages become less visible. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is an old story, but the principle applies perfectly: when every message asks for attention, people stop trusting the signal.

A Procrustean Bed for Conversations

Chat has become a Procrustean bed for company conversations. It forces a one-size-fits-all approach onto one of the most important aspects of human activity: communication. Instead of choosing the right format for the right conversation, we squeeze almost everything into instant messages. The main distinction is whether the message appears in a channel, a group chat, or a private conversation.

I understand why people look at Slack and think, “We could replace everything with this”. It is convenient. It is simple. It is polished. But forcing every kind of communication into the same format has a price: lower productivity, weaker decision-making, lost context, and disappearing company knowledge. Chat is useful for speed. It is useful when people need to coordinate quickly, ask a simple question, or have a brief one-on-one or small-group conversation.

But speed is not the only thing that matters. Some discussions require people to pause, think, gather information, and return with a considered response. Some decisions remain important long after the messages that produced them have disappeared into the abyss of endless scrolling. Some conversations should become part of the company’s memory.

Important, but Not Urgent

Healthy company communication needs an asynchronous option for conversations that are important but not urgent.

Chat can remain useful for quick exchanges. But when a discussion requires careful thought and does not need an immediate answer, teams need another place for it. For a long time, email filled that role. But email is not a particularly convenient environment for ongoing company discussions. Conversations become fragmented across inboxes, recipients, forwards, and reply chains. It is difficult to understand who has the full context and even harder to turn the discussion into knowledge that remains useful later.

That is where VOSTORQ can help. VOSTORQ is a structured discussion workspace that gives important company conversations a proper home. Decisions, proposals, debates, escalations, and long-running discussions can live inside persistent Topics instead of disappearing into a channel.

It is not about eliminating workplace messengers. Teams can keep chat for quick messages and immediate coordination. VOSTORQ is for the conversations that matter now — and will still matter later.