[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.