[athenot]

> Not responding immediately or within a day could label you rude or non-collaborative. Even if you didn’t want others to feel like that, the receiving end of a chat message couldn’t help it. They felt they needed to respond immediately.

It really depends on the expectations of the team and the culture of the company. I suspect this is the same attitude that would manifest itself in the office as people randomly walking up and asking a question, thus disrupting the thought process. Some companies fare better than others in respecting people's time and concentration.

The author is organizing everything in Basecamp projects, and I'm glad that works for them. Basecamp is a great tool. But a similar process is possible with chat. We use Webex Teams (eating our own dogfood, by way of disclaimer) and organize ourselves in teams (pun intended) where there are many rooms for various topics. The general expectation is that participation is async unless you're @-mentioned. If one requests some task to be done and it's not some quick thing, the answer is usually "create a Jira ticket for me".

One of the limitation of chat systems such as Teams and Slack is when people try to use them to keep track of work items. That creates stress. But for ongoing topics that one can join or leave at will, it's rather useful. And if the discussion becomes something that needs to be sychronous, being able to instantly start a video call, hash it out then go back to other work is way better than back-and-forth in text, be it in a chat room or project management system.

The other point that the article touches on which is super important is leadership happens is actively involved remotely. That prevents relegating remote workers to second class status.