Instant messengers in general are a huge distraction. But if you turn them off, at some moment you will miss an urgent message from your boss, and then you are in trouble.
It seems like in theory, people should be able to exercise some self-control and properly label their messages as “urgent” and “not urgent”. In practice, as far as I have seen, this quickly becomes a multi-player Prisonner’s Dilemma and people gradually learn to defect. First the high-status people break the rules to signal their status, later the rest of the company joins them because “everyone is doing it”.
In my experience, in one company, it was the boss who reminded everyone to turn off notifications, because the constant interruption decreases productivity. A week or two later, the same boss was angry, because he posted some urgent message from a customer, and received no response for an hour. (“But don’t you understand that this is important?” Well, of course we can’t evaluate the importance of the message without seeing it first.)
The most crazy situation I have experienced, each message resulted in three separate notifications. First the message appeared on Microsoft Teams. Then, if you were not currently working in Teams (like 99% of the time), you received an e-mail saying: “You have a new message on Microsoft Teams”. A few seconds later, in the Windows notification sidebar, a notification appeared: “You have received a new e-mail”. (These were company settings that we had no permission to modify.)
One reasonable way to handle that is an oncall rotation. Designate someone to be interrupted often, and only that person has the mechanism (often another channel, like actual phone call or special interruption/notification rule) to interrupt others on the team if they need help urgently.
The only time I enable IM and e-mail notifications is when I have “office hours” on my calendar, and I’m explicitly available to people.
We have no cultural norms around how to handle this well in cyberspace.
At the office, it’s unlikely someone would start talking to you if they saw you were already engaged with someone. But on instant messengers, this information is hidden from others, so there’s no reason to hold back. And, from the other side, if you’re engaged with somebody, someone else can come over and wave their hands to get your attention because something is urgent. On instant messengers, they can only @ you a couple of times and pray that you’re not away from keyboard.
So what we get here is a race to the bottom, where everyone has to talk more loudly to be heard above the din.
I’ve seen some companies handle this well by emphasizing asynchronous, long-form writing over other types of communication. I wish I knew how they shifted to that type of culture because my current job is super Slack-heavy.
I guess that many people just suck at writing. Programmers who refuse to write documentation, insisting that everything in their code is perfectly obvious. Managers who organize a meeting, without sending the agenda beforehand and the meeting minutes afterwards. I think this is the reason, because if those people are somehow forced to write something, the results are often horrible. (Ironically, they can later use this as an evidence that written communication sucks.)
Or perhaps they are not sure about something, and do not want to reveal their ignorance in writing. If I write you half page describing the problem, and I made a stupid mistake at the beginning, it will be perfectly visible. If instead I just write “hey, can we have a call?”, I leave no written record. Even if I type in chat, at least I can packpedal after seeing that I got something wrong.
Instant messengers in general are a huge distraction. But if you turn them off, at some moment you will miss an urgent message from your boss, and then you are in trouble.
It seems like in theory, people should be able to exercise some self-control and properly label their messages as “urgent” and “not urgent”. In practice, as far as I have seen, this quickly becomes a multi-player Prisonner’s Dilemma and people gradually learn to defect. First the high-status people break the rules to signal their status, later the rest of the company joins them because “everyone is doing it”.
In my experience, in one company, it was the boss who reminded everyone to turn off notifications, because the constant interruption decreases productivity. A week or two later, the same boss was angry, because he posted some urgent message from a customer, and received no response for an hour. (“But don’t you understand that this is important?” Well, of course we can’t evaluate the importance of the message without seeing it first.)
The most crazy situation I have experienced, each message resulted in three separate notifications. First the message appeared on Microsoft Teams. Then, if you were not currently working in Teams (like 99% of the time), you received an e-mail saying: “You have a new message on Microsoft Teams”. A few seconds later, in the Windows notification sidebar, a notification appeared: “You have received a new e-mail”. (These were company settings that we had no permission to modify.)
One reasonable way to handle that is an oncall rotation. Designate someone to be interrupted often, and only that person has the mechanism (often another channel, like actual phone call or special interruption/notification rule) to interrupt others on the team if they need help urgently.
The only time I enable IM and e-mail notifications is when I have “office hours” on my calendar, and I’m explicitly available to people.
We have no cultural norms around how to handle this well in cyberspace.
At the office, it’s unlikely someone would start talking to you if they saw you were already engaged with someone. But on instant messengers, this information is hidden from others, so there’s no reason to hold back. And, from the other side, if you’re engaged with somebody, someone else can come over and wave their hands to get your attention because something is urgent. On instant messengers, they can only @ you a couple of times and pray that you’re not away from keyboard.
So what we get here is a race to the bottom, where everyone has to talk more loudly to be heard above the din.
I’ve seen some companies handle this well by emphasizing asynchronous, long-form writing over other types of communication. I wish I knew how they shifted to that type of culture because my current job is super Slack-heavy.
I guess that many people just suck at writing. Programmers who refuse to write documentation, insisting that everything in their code is perfectly obvious. Managers who organize a meeting, without sending the agenda beforehand and the meeting minutes afterwards. I think this is the reason, because if those people are somehow forced to write something, the results are often horrible. (Ironically, they can later use this as an evidence that written communication sucks.)
Or perhaps they are not sure about something, and do not want to reveal their ignorance in writing. If I write you half page describing the problem, and I made a stupid mistake at the beginning, it will be perfectly visible. If instead I just write “hey, can we have a call?”, I leave no written record. Even if I type in chat, at least I can packpedal after seeing that I got something wrong.
Former boss: you don’t need comments, you can just look at the code and see what it does..
Me: you need comments to tell you why it does it...