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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Like I've said elsewhere, there's no built-in contact state that effectively communicates whether the person you are trying to reach is in normal work hours or they're with their family and only expect to be contacted in emergencies. It is a huge cultural problem, but the solution is technical: bring back away messages. It worked for AIM.

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I dislike contact states personally. They are mostly noise. People set them, don't set them, forget they set them, had some program set them etc.

For me it is fairly simple - usually texts in my company are higher urgency, location agnostic, communication. Only reason I would text is I need someone sooner than they see an email/Lync message, but I don't need them urgent enough to interrupt with a call. "I'm running late from this meeting, can we delay?", "you ok for lunch in 5?" etc. people typically respect that rough, unexpressed, protocol.

Away messages wouldn't hurt but that's not what the GP is talking about. We receive dozens of messages and notifications, we shouldn't have to feel we should be dropping everything we're doing to respond just because it's during "normal work hours". This expectation used to common with email, and maybe still is in some companies, but we've slowly come to accept email as what it is - asynchronous communication. Mobile notifications and chat applications are a step back in this respect.

"We receive dozens of messages and notifications,"

I've been "on call" for a while before, and part of the solution is to deal directly with that. Anything app that thinks it has the right to pop up notifications whenever the hell it feels like it (and why is "3am" so often when they feel like it?) better have a setting to undo that easily found, or they're in for a rude uninstalling. Anything else that thinks it gets the priority interrupt had better be prepared to discover it doesn't.

Because I need to save that priority interrupt for the actually important "site down" notice. I was getting a visceral twitch whenever I got a text because having the same alert for "CARTHAGE IS BURNING PREPARE TO SPEND HOURS FIXING IT YES I KNOW IT'S 2AM" and "hey whats up dude" was not working for me.

I'm not on that call anymore, but I've kept the habit of keeping everything away from that level of interrupt. If it's that important, pick up the phone and call me. Provide social proof of its importance by putting your own attention into the conversation. (Which, of course, can only be done by a real human.) Otherwise, you're not that important and you can deal with a delay.

If you're a distributed remote company with people who prefer to work early and others who like to work late, all in different time zones, what are "normal work hours?"

Also, I work I higher education, where things move slowly. Although we don't have an assumption that after-hours emails will be replied to until the next business day, any delay of a day or more can cascade to far more delay on the other end(s).

It's more than a technical problem. It requires a mindset change. Even if I'm Available, I can still be in the middle of a task and rather respond later - or perhaps think about how I want to respond. Also, by not responding immediately, it trains the sender not to expect instant replies. Contact states always introduce other issues.

What issues? By "training" the person that contacts you it only affects their relationship with you, and has to be clarified for everyone you're in contact with. Some people will assume the rules that apply to them are the same for everyone else, unless you plan on explicitly defining your preferences to prevent misunderstandings.

Issues include:

- Privacy/InfoSec - Forgetting to change status - Meaningless status states (Away was never really that accurate or meaningful) - Extra messaging friction

I've found that it's usually just a few certain types that expect instant replies. It doesn't require too much time for them to get that I respond when I can. The same rules do apply to everyone, but I'll deliberately delay responses at times so as not to feed the expectation of the reply-needy. With email, I have set times to review and reply.

I never ever wasn't "away" in ICQ and most in my friend list did the same. In my narrow experience its use tends to erode pretty quickly.

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