[whack]

I've personally found that I get much better results when I say hello first, as opposed to including everything in a single message.

My hypothesis: When you ask someone a full detailed question, the other person sees the whole thing at once, as one big daunting block of text, and they decide to ignore it for a while. Conversely, when you message someone saying "hi", it builds suspense. They start to wonder what you're going to message them about. They pause what they were doing for the few seconds while waiting for you to type out your full comment. Often times, they even reply saying something like "hello" or "what's up". All this increases their buy-in into the conversation, and makes them feel more invested. As a result, when they finally get your actual question 20 seconds later, they are a lot more willing to reply immediately.

Is it time inefficient for the other person to have to sit around for 20 seconds while you're typing in your actual question? Yes, sorry for wasting 20 seconds of your time. But that's a trivial tradeoff in comparison to me getting the information I need so I can be unblocked and productive.

If and when people start to reply promptly to messages, I'd be perfectly willing to stop using these tricks and hacks. But until then... hi.

[anotherevan]

But writing a daunting block of text will often take more than 20 seconds. What you wrote comes off as an incredibly self-centred point of view.

If you're writing big paragraphs right off the bat, then perhaps you need to think about what your typing and refine things a bit more before you break someone's attention from what they are doing.

As Mark Twain wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” You shouldn't do this, even with instant messaging.

> If and when people start to reply promptly to messages…

And there's that air of entitlement again. There seems to be two wrong assumptions: First, that everyone is in front of their instant message client all the time; and second, that they're that invested in dropping everything they are doing to sink ten or twenty minutes of chat messages back and forth with you.

[whack]

Since you've made a number of assumptions about me, let me make one about you as well. You sound exactly like the colleagues I've worked with who think that their time is more valuable than everyone else's. In reality, most research shows that helping others in an organizational context is strongly correlated with business success.

https://hbr.org/2013/04/in-the-company-of-givers-and-takers

I am extremely selfless in helping colleagues who ask me for help, and I would like others to do unto me as I would do unto them. To me, that sounds perfectly fair, and well aligned with the greater organization's goals.

Regarding some specific points you made:

- I spend a lot of time thinking about exactly what I'm going to say, even before I send the first hello

- It typically takes me only 20-30 seconds to write out the message immediately following the hello

- If someone happens to be busy and doesn't respond immediately to my message, I have no complaints. This is equally true whether or not I start off my message with a "hello", and is irrelevant to this discussion

[anotherevan]

There's a certain irony that your original comment sounded like you think your time is much more valuable than everyone else's too, which is probably why it's gotten so downvoted. In any case...

I probably do sound like the colleagues you've worked with. It's not that I think my time is more valuable than everyone else's, but I do this my time is valuable. It sucks that your colleagues have treated you this way. I've worked with colleagues who would interrupt me every ten or twenty minutes, just when I'm getting back into the flow of concentration needed for programming which they broke ten or twenty minutes ago, often for what seem like very simple or trivial things. My frustrations with that probably bled through in my writing.

I also agree with the principle of treating others as I would like them to treat me. Looping that back to the original topic: that is exactly why I strongly prefer not to just receive a, "Hello," with a wait for response in instant messaging, but an initial message more in line with what the article suggests. This is also what I do when sending an initial message for the same reason: I value the other person's time and want to be cognisant of that.

[whack]

There's certainly a balance to be struck between valuing your own time, and valuing that of your colleagues. I just think that most people tend to err far too much on the side of not helping a colleague in need. This is backed up by the study that I linked in my previous post as well.

In an ideal world where my colleagues have learned to find that balance, no such hacks are needed. But given the reality of most teams I've worked with, if using such hacks and "wasting 20 seconds of their time" is the price I need to pay, that certainly seems like the lesser of two evils.