[CraigJPerry]

I’ve given up trying to use chat as chat. It’s just another inbox now. All notifications disabled and instead its another “pull” mechanism. i’ll look in on Slack or whatever when i’m doing my rounds every couple of hours processing all my inboxes - pull requests, emails, blog notifications etc. Any chat threads get treated with the same GTD process - delete it, delegate it, do it or defer it.

I feel much more content controlling blocks of time to be productive instead of trying to run that chat treadmill.

[dvtrn]

I feel much more content controlling blocks of time to be productive instead of trying to run that chat treadmill

I too am guilty (conscientiously) of being a stochastic chat respondent, both with work chat and social chats.

Especially when cohorts begin a chat message with "Hey." followed by a pause and a wait for the message to be acknowledged in return, waiting for them typing out what it is they need me for and then typing back a response.

It kills momentum of work so much when people do this.

Much prefer "Hey. Need help with _______" just seems infinitely more efficient for both parties. Can quickly type back a solution, a delegation point ("I think _____ knows how that works") or a deferral ("Let me get back to you after ____") or file it in my mind while coming to a stopping point on whatever I'm working on if I need just a moment more to reach that point before pivoting over to a reply.

[silviogutierrez]

I always link them to nohello.com

The full post explains how to avoid being rude.

[dvtrn]

It's funny you link that because as soon as my fingers hit reply on my first comment, I began looking for blog posts to see if anyone had written about how frustratingly distracting the 'naked hello' (as I call it to my office mate) is.

Definitely putting this in my slack status right now. Thanks

[wffurr]

It's almost too stereotypical for the chat examples on that page to look like IRC.

[graton]

I usually point people at: https://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/02/20/naked-pings/

Written about IRC but applies to any chat type app, IMHO

From: Adam Jackson To: memo-list Subject: On “ping” etiquitte Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:21:30 -0500

IRC has developed a “ping” convention for getting someone’s attention. It works because most clients will highlight channels in which your name has been mentioned, so something like

ajax: ping

will make that channel show up pink instead of white for me [1].

I wish to correct, or at least amend, this behaviour. The naked ping should be Considered Harmful, for at least two reasons. The first is that it conveys no information. The recipient of your ping, like you, is a Busy Person. They may be in the middle of something requiring intricate thought, and should not be interrupted for anything less than fire, flood, or six figures of revenue. Worse, _you_ may forget why you pinged someone; when, four hours later, your victim gets back to IRC and responds to you, _you_ will be disrupted in turn trying to remember what was on your mind in the first place.

The second, more subtle reason proceeds from the first. A ping with no data is essentially a command. It’s passive-aggressive; it implies that the recipient’s time is less valuable than yours. [2] The pingee will respond in one (or both) of two ways. Either they will experience increased stress due to increased unpredictable demands on their time, or they will simply ignore naked pings.

The fundamental issue here is a misunderstanding of the medium. IRC is not a telephone. It’s volatile storage. The whole reason the ping works is because the client remembers seeing the ping, and can save it in your history buffer so you can see who was talking to you and why.

The naked ping removes this context.

Please. Save your time. Save my time. Make all of our lives more efficient and less stressful. Ping with data. At a minimum:

ajax: ping re bz 534027

See the difference? Now you’ve turned slow, lockstep, PIO-like interaction into smooth pipelineable DMA. It’s good for your hardware, and it’s good for you.

[1] – irssi 4 life.

[2] – Their time may well be less valuable than yours. That’s not the point.