Universal Inbox (Needed)

35 years down the broad spread personal computing and messaging and clipboard cut/paste has been used increasingly more. The phone apps bubble with their notifications and we shuffle between them moving pieces of information manually from one app to another. It is increasingly difficult to keep track of all the messages on multiple accounts and systems - email, short messages, WhatsApp, Slack, Confluence, Jira, LinkedIn messages, Twitter DMs and so on. Very often the same information is sent using multiple channels. E.g., when boarding a flight I'm getting an SMS, and email and an in-app notification.

To be honest an universal messaging client is my biggest hope for the AI. I don't want a self driving car. I want a simple (single!) phone app which would collect, aggregate, and manage the incoming streams of messages, drop spam, unsubscribe subscriptions I never subscribed to, categorize what is urgent and requires attention and what can be handled later and so on. Otherwise we will drown in this swamp. Many are already cheek-deep in that.

Out of all the communications tools Slack is becoming probably most efficient for closed groups' internal communication. In the office today we practically do not use email anymore (only for external messages), as it minimizes the bloat allowing to get to th point (no titles, no intros, no footers, everything is transparent). It also has a quite good "Catch-Up" tool (which for me works only on a phone - but let it be). Allows me to very quickly get in sync, especially when I am in a well-behind time zone (like today).

So my travel routine has become Slack first then email (external customers and partners) and then the rest which is mostly social media (including the professional social media). But Slack can be awkward to newbies and it takes getting used to an mastering it.