[ano-ther]

I think the problem is that the receiver wants to be polite and answer. And the sender wants to be polite and not interrupt[1].

So the extended etiquette is: if you don’t have time, it’s ok to not reply.

[1] There’s also the concern that your message appears on someone’s shared screen during a video call.

[smeej]

Person sharing the screen is 100% responsible for making sure such notifications are turned off, not the other person sending the message.

[d1sxeyes]

While that is true, nevertheless it’s nice to consider that people are human and make mistakes.

It can be quite difficult to ‘correct’ that mistake once made, as in order to disable notifications, you often need to open up the chat app itself, which makes all of your conversations flash up on the screen.

Yes, of course you can always just stop sharing, disable notifications, and re-enable, but nevertheless, I always try to actually do the opposite, and send ‘hi’ and then the a follow up message for exactly this reason if I’m sending anything that is confidential or contentious. The difference is that I write the full message first (ctrl + a, ctrl + x, ‘hi’, enter, ctrl + v, enter), so that there’s essentially no delay between ‘hi’ and the content of my message.

You never know.

[jpl56]

I hate Teams for that. There's no simple way to temporary hide notifications but going deep into the menus. I would need a "hide notifications for the next 5, 10 ou 15 minutes" you can activate without having to think.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Not only that, but if you set it to run on startup, it will pop in front of all the rest of the windows and show not something neutral like the team list, but your last chat.

So if you teach with a laptop, its awfully sluggish startup is timed just right so that you have enough time to turn on the laptop, turn on the projector, open the presentation, connect the HDMI cable, wait for the presentation to show up and check that it works, start talking, and just then... BAM, there goes your last private chat in front of all the students.

Of course, it can be fixed by just not setting it to autostart - but why should I have to do that? Why is that program so chock full of obviously bad design decisions?

[smeej]

If you spend your time trying to account for every mistake someone might make, you're going to waste an awful lot of your life.

Most people spend only a tiny amount of time sharing their screen on a call. The people who do a lot of it are well-practiced in managing their notifications.

There's no good reason to make your normal communication worse for the sake of avoiding such a rare problem.

[d1sxeyes]

Not normal communication, confidential or contentious communication.

“Hey, could you send me a link to the Jones file?” or “When do we need to get the Acme Corp RfP response out by?” I would just fire over.

“John says the financials don’t work on the Bravo Inc renewal, can you take a look?” or “Jenny’s not doing great on her PIP, we might need to move to the next step”, I would be more careful with.

[ano-ther]

Fully agree. But the insensible default on most programs is “all notifications on all the time” and there are users who don’t know how to change it.

Just had my message barge into an important presentation last week because the presenter got a new computer with the defaults on.

[squigz]

> I think the problem is that the receiver wants to be polite and answer. And the sender wants to be polite and not interrupt[1].

It seems that both of these problems would be solved if the sender just gets to the point?