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by kolbusa 1657 days ago
Skip the dog part, but please please please try put as much details in the first IM as opposed to starting with 'hey'.
2 comments

And please, please, do not start with "Hi Name", send that, then proceed to spend the next five minutes typing your message.

It is just fine to lead with hi, as long as it arrives at the same time as everything else.

I reply with this link when people do that to me :

https://nohello.net/

They learn quickly.

You may also want to learn that using a hello before going further (or at least separated from the rest of the im) is a way to make sure your are comfortable having the message pop up on your screen.

You would learn fast when you have someone looking at your screen and receiving "have you slept with Jenny yet?", or "you should not have called Jack a dick" when Jack is with you.

The lesson to learn from that is that you shouldn't stick your nose in other peoples' business.
…this is insanity.

If you have someone looking over your shoulder, you silencing all notifications.

But why would you send crazy gossip like that anyway? Please just keep things work related so we can all focus on producing results.

> you silencing all notifications

Good luck with that when you have 5 or 10 messaging systems.

> But why would you send crazy gossip like that anyway?

It was obviously to show an extreme. replace this with confidential business information and there you are.

we work hard and we play hard, together! that can mean working 14 hour days, together! but it's ok we are all one big happy family, we choose our own families, we are together. This company IS my life!

Please keep all messages strictly work related!

It's rude to just reply with that, but to put it in your status and to ask them politely afterwards usually works way better.
You should cultivate a relationship where you aren't afraid of being to the point.

I haven't got time in my life to carefully and delicately walk around people's feelings with every single small work matter. If someone takes something like a link to nohello very personally, you've got to fix that relationship.

You often do not have a relationship with people who don't know about your nohello.net thing, because your getting support questions, and you cannot cultivate a relationship with everyone.

So in the spirit of being direct, your attitude has probably caused issues in your personal life and career that you are not aware of, and has probably created a reputation in your company as 'the grumpy/rude one'. It's not that much more work to be polite and your attitude probably spreads to other actions in your work.

I wish I'd remembered that. I actually used that in my training at one point!