An article in The Next Web proclaimed 'Slack is quietly, unintentionally killing IRC,' and this switch has also come to many open source communities. Slack quickly became the darling of software development circles, leading to the displacement of many other tools. I like to keep work separate so I can turn off personal communications when I'm at work, and vice versa.

Personally, I find it too easy to be distracted by non-work conversations when I reuse the chat feature of, say, a social media tool. I would advocate that for your team collaboration needs, you pick a tool that's exclusive to work, though not everyone agrees on this. As I write this, for example, I'm using at least two team collaboration tools, but the notifications are silenced so that I can check in periodically as the breaks in my work allow for it, just as I silence social media notifications when I really need to get stuff done. And it's equally important to be able to give yourself the space to work uninterrupted when you have tasks that require longer periods of concentration.

There's still a perception out there in some circles that chat applications can be a distraction, and I do believe it's important to have a commitment to reel in off-topic threads before they create a cognitive disruption. Whether your colleagues are sitting across the room from you or on the other side of the planet, the ability to communicate in real-time makes many conversations faster, easier, and can help reduce confusion that might emerge in asynchronous communication. One collaboration tool which has become indispensable is team chat.

What tools work best for you depends a bit on your situation, but might include anything from mailing lists for email communication, Git or Subversion for version control, a wiki or Etherpad for collaborative authoring, a shared task list for organizing workflow, or even a full-fledged project management suite. In any collaborative environment, it's important to have good tools for communication.

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