How do you manage the gap between team chat and real work?

Question

I'm a founder based in South Korea, running a small dev team. Like most startups, we use Slack for chatting, Notion for tasks, Google Docs for documents, Gmail, and a bunch of other tools.Here's what keeps happening: we have a conversation on Slack, a decision gets made, I go create a Notion page with the task. Then I go back to Slack and write "guys, please check the Notion page I just created."And then... silence. I don't know who saw it. I don't know who's working on it. Two days later I ask about it and someone says "oh, I didn't see that message."The real issue isn't any single tool it's that conversations happen in one place, tasks live in another, and there's no connection between them. Context gets lost every time we switch tools.How does your team handle this? Have you found a setup that actually keeps conversations and tasks connected? Or is this just something every small team deals with?

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

I worked at a startup where it was a running gag that we had an "all hands" every two weeks and somebody put their hands up and said that they couldn't find documents in the places we kept them and suggested the answer was adding a new place to store files -- somehow we never got insight into a group about this.
There are two sensible answers to this problem:
(1) Treat it as a wetware problem, that is, if people are well organized in a team they are going to figure out what their business process is and stick with it regardless of what tools you use.
(2) Treat it as a technology problem. The obvious thing here is some kind of system which can not only search over a large number of "documents" (e.g. a message on Slack is a tiny document) but understand the relationships between the documents.