Hey everyone,
Quick question out of curiosity.
I work as a manager in a consulting firm, and a lot of my day goes into communicating across platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, LinkedIn messages, etc. Switching between all of them sometimes feels a bit messy.
A couple of things I personally struggle with are important tasks getting buried in chats and constantly jumping between apps to keep up with conversations.
Would be great to hear how you handle this in your day-to-day work.
In your shoes, I would run a Matrix server, and set up bridges for each platform I need a chat presence on.
Back in the early 2000s, I used Trillian.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any current app that would combine all the messegers into 1 for what I am using in 2026.
Trillian was amazing. I blame Google for killing it with Embrace, Extent, Extinguish.
Not sure what Google has to do with it. It wasn’t made by them. It didn’t even use their services. It’s also technically still around… But it’s primary use is with… Healthcare services. 🤨
Google Talk used XMPP under the hood, so it worked perfectly with Trillian and many other clients.
Except, over time, Google extended Google Talk with features outside the open XMPP specification, and didn’t contribute them back.
Eventually, Google pushed an update that caused alternate clients like Trillian to no longer work with Google Talk.
Google intentionally embraced, extended and did their damnedest to extinguish XMPP, directly causing the largest drop in other Trillian users to connect with - the day that the entire Google Talk network became unavailable to Trillian users.
there are stuff like miranda-ng but i don’t think there’s one for the platforms you need sadly… fuck proprietary protocols and networks
I dont really meet clients where theyre at, in this way. I think most firms avoid this.
We do SMS, teams, and email. We manage projects and tasks manually.
I’d never talk to a client on linked in or Facebook.
That makes sense, and I can see why sticking to a few platforms keeps things manageable.
The challenge for me comes when clients reach out on multiple platforms I don’t control. Tracking those messages and taking further action becomes tricky. I’m still looking for a solution that can help handle that smoothly.
I haven’t been on Facebook in awhile and I don’t know if you mean a business page or your personal but can you set up an automated message like, “Thanks for reaching out, we’d love to talk with you, you can text us or call us on this number, here’s our email, and here’s our main office number.” Or something like that?
Yeah, when that happens we just do dumbass redirect.
Thanks so much for reaching out to us, id love to talk it over with you. Give me a call and you can find out whether we’re gong to be a good fit.
For us anyway, linked in just isn’t a place we would acquire real meaningful clients. Any contact there will be low yield, low priority.
You need woof
I retired about 4 years ago, but before I did, my office was using Teams, Slack, and Outlook to manage communications at work, and occasionally text messaging or social media (FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) outside of work to get information outside of business hours.
To keep things organized, we always had a singular database where we tracked all tasks and projects, as well as who they were assigned to. We used to have this on SharePoint, but with Teams expanding their toolkit, we rebuilt our SharePoint sites there. No matter where the communication came from, it was everyone’s responsibility to update the master task list with new items, but core projects were always added and tracked by upper management.
It became habit to update the status of projects at least once daily. If a project went 2 or 3 days without a new status - even a simple note stating that no work had been done that day on this particular task - then upper management would come asking questions. Yes, there was a bit of micromanagement, but it kept us task-oriented and productive. We always reviewed everything on the master task list every morning and prioritized our day based on what could be accomplished. Nothing was missed.
I personally would also make bullet lists throughout my day with simple checklist-type objectives. Anytime someone asked me to do something, it’d go on the bullet list. Any new update I needed to add to the master task list, I’d make a quick bullet reminder. A new idea pops into my head… into the bullet list so I don’t forget about it later.
I have ADHD, so keeping focused on multiple things throughout my day was difficult and I’d always forget some important details. Keeping my own simple checklist on my person let me hyperfocus on one or two projects at a time without completely losing track of all the other things I needed to deal with that day.
I got real quick at jotting down notes as information came to me, so I could track dozens of projects a day and never lose details on any of them. At the end of my work day, I could settle down and take my time writing out detailed logs in the master task list so upper management would be satisfied with the effort put into my projects that day. The more detailed my logs, the less likely they’d come to ask me questions and interrupt my workflow during the day.
Thanks for sharing this, really appreciate the detail.
The single source of truth approach makes a lot of sense, and I can see how that would help a lot in managing tasks and making sure nothing gets missed.
That said, I just feel one piece is missing for me which is live communication across a single platform. Right now it feels like too much manual effort to move things from chats into a task system.
Trying to find something that reduces that gap a bit.
I don’t know that there is a great way to manage it. Each one implicitly wants you to use their platform exclusively, yeah? You’d have to get everyone on the same page about which platform, when, and what for. If you’re stuck with so many different platforms, the solution might just be firmer moderation and organisational rules
Yeah, that’s a fair point.
Internally, it’s still manageable to set some rules and keep things organized. The real challenge starts when it comes to client communication, since I don’t have much control over which platform they use. That’s where things get a bit messy and harder to standardize.
Stronger rules probably help on the internal side, but still trying to figure out a better way to handle the client side without so much manual effort.
You could choose to make yourself less available on certain platforms - set an away message that points to your preferred intake (call it “for urgent requests…”), and set a reminder to less frequently check on those other feeds to follow up with clients who won’t be meeting you where you’re at. That’d be my first idea, anyway
Matrix bridging. Note that it is for text messaging only, not for voice/video calling.
Nice. Matrix has so many bridges available.
Beeper covers a good number of chat platforms. I use it for Instagram and Whatsapp, and it has desktop app as well as mobile.
Yeah, I agree, Beeper is pretty great for bringing everything into one place. Makes handling multiple apps a lot smoother.
But I still feel it’s missing that AI layer like auto summaries, extracting tasks, or helping manage a proper to-do list from chats. That’s the part I keep feeling is missing.
Many, many monitors.
Yeah, that’s definitely one way to do it. It’s feasible, but feels like it would need a lot of bandwidth and attention to keep up with everything at once.
Instruct your others that if they want or need you to do something then they communicate via a single method.
Then ignore all the rest.
Internally it’s doable to set that kind of rule, but when it comes to clients, it’s not really practical to ask them to switch or stick to one platform.
That’s where it gets tricky, since I still have to stay flexible on their side.
It can be, you just say you only use “messaging app of choice” and email. Email always works. And you can’t use any other app due to company security policies.
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This is a great question. I’m struggling myself jumping from 30 minute meeting to meeting for 6 hours in a day and I have to remember what is said in each when I haven’t internalized all of the things (so my shorthand notes are often incomplete or even unintelligible) and all the tasks and who they are assigned to so I can follow up or pass them along. And At the sane time I have to multitask during meetings to actually get my job done which means I’m often tuned out for part of the congestion. And the whole time I have to respond to messages, some of them urgent issues that need quick action.
I do my best to capture everything in Obsidian, but the more stuff I have the harder it is to organize: does something belong in my daily notes, which is more accessible but hardest to find, or is it a quick task where once I complete it and delete it I’ve lost what was done, or is it a standalone task, or is it something that should be documented in project status? FUUUUUUUCK!
I spend 30-60 minutes a day just organizing my notes and tasks. I have to do any actual work (including said organization) before 9-10am because that’s when the deluge of meetings start and once they are done for the day I’m just spent.
I can totally relate to that. Back-to-back meetings, multitasking, and trying to keep track of everything can get overwhelming really fast.
I try to capture tasks in one place too, but the tricky part for me is when client communications come from multiple platforms, it’s hard to track everything live while also managing my internal notes. I’m really looking for a tool or workflow that can help reduce that load and keep both live messages and tasks organized in real time.
