Think about the last big discussion on your team. How did it feel trying to follow it?
Messages fly everywhere. Multiple conversations pile on top of each other. Context disappears into the scroll. You spend hours trying to find that message you sent earlier. It feels like wrestling with everyone just to reach a decision.
Roughly one third of a modern CEO's job is trying to find that fucking Slack conversation you were in earlier pic.twitter.com/MTaJumBjuB
— Eoghan McCabe (@eoghan) May 24, 2025
Chat apps create constant urgency. The instant communication cycle rewards you for being responsive over being productive. They treat every message as equally important, making each one feel like it needs an immediate response. Studies show that an average response time of 77 seconds between messages is not uncommon.
77 seconds isn’t enough time to think through complex problems. Your brain can’t digest the issue properly. You’ll engage in back-and-forth, jumping on the first thought that comes to mind. This discussion becomes chaotic, with everyone talking over each other.
So you’re left with the chaos you experience every day. Fighting to get to a decision, thinking this is just ‘how it has to be’.
Altenative to Chat: Posts
We use them on Cushion for almost everything.
With posts you get time to think. Each post represents a complete thought. The discussion is consistently on-topic because it is separated from all other messages in that channel. The core topic is clearly visible and gives context to the threads of discussion below it.
Posts are asynchronous. There’s no pressure to reply, read, or move on immediately. By writing complete thoughts rather than one-off messages, you can take more time to reply but convey more information in one response. The pace of back-and-forth slows, but you reach quality discussion and clear answers faster because each comment covers more ground.
Team members can easily follow discussions that happened while they were away, or ignore discussions that don’t affect them. The whole history of thought lives in one place. Have you tried piecing together chat messages and meeting notes to understand past decisions? It’s archaeological work nobody signed up for.
Instant communication feels necessary for urgent tasks. But when everything feels urgent, nothing is. By moving to Posts, truly urgent things remain urgent. In Cushion, we have one-to-one chat just like Slack, so if something is truly urgent, we aren’t fighting off 25 other less important things to find it. It’s right there.
Posts transformed our work.
We moved from rushed conversations in crowded rooms to thoughtful discussion spaces. This simple change allowed us to spend less time wrestling with work discussions and more time doing the work we love.