Soon You'll Hate Group Chat as Much as You Hate E-mail
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The thing is, as I've seen in this, group chat has a "cuteness" to it. Just like IRC back in the day (or today depending on if you still use it), people are much less formal in group chat and there seems to be less expectation of formality. There is cat pictures and funny emoticons. This isn't a tool challenge; both email and group chat can be equally informal and cute. I contend that email /still/ is a better mechanism given the non-realtime nature of it.
But then again, the realtime nature of group chat is what some like. It's precisely what I don't like. I like 1-1 chat quite a bit, though I very quickly default to video in these cases as well (higher fidelity, quicker, less prone to written miscommunication).
Hipchat/Slack/IRC are great for some use cases that require the type of communication (specifically I think of operations, incidents or things along those lines). I feel other general team communication in these mechanisms is, well, overblown. My gut tells me PRs are better for much of what group chat serves, and if not PRs, email/ML are still great. And don't forget getting everyone into a room or video hangout.
I don't particularly like email, but I don't hate it either. I do, however, very much dislike group chat.
them: put notification X in channel!
me: okay, but let's keep it targetted and filter for important issues only
them: you worry too much
them: since we're doing X notifications, let's do Y! People need to know Y.
me: okay, it's getting spammy now, need to rein this in
them: yeah, you're right
them: so, we're putting Z notifications in now, and expanding X and Y
me: please, the horror. everyone will move to another channel
them: but people need to know these things!
me: does EVERYONE need to know that dev Foo changed status on jira ticket Bar?
them: you're missing the point
them: let's add more projects, and we tick this 'send notifications' box, right?
me: no
them: sure we do, that's what we do for other projects
et al.
If most of your office communication is about spreading awareness, email is pretty terrible. It requires every person to manually handle each individual message. Most users struggle with this badly. It's a huge waste of time when the effects are propagated throughout an office - everyone is receiving and filing exact copies of the same messages. That's the advantage of team chat - it spreads awareness without the mental overhead applied to each worker.
If you need to make a record, email is great. I've found that response expectations are far less affected by the medium (email or team chat) than by the office culture. One is simply easier to manage and respond to.
It's about shelf life. Both group chats and emails have a shelf life. Emails have a longer shelf life (probably up to 48 hours in responding and staying relevant in many cases) whereas group chat's have shelf lives measured in minutes. Chat is great for quick one off's, maybe even a few key people on hand, but not for extended groups. In fact, it's rather terrible.
Nothing beats meetings with all the right folks, though. Meetings are much better than both group chat or email for spreading awareness. Actually, now that I write this, this might be a use of chat; a virtual meeting via chat. Though, I argue the utility is in having all the parties present and not the protocol.
You want forums, or newsgroups, or wikis, or even listservs for any sort of permanence.
Doesn't help when people send to non-ML or individual emails, but it works wonders for ML and distribution lists.
Google Groups is basically newsgroups - indeed, I believe the product you use in the business evolved out of Google's old Usenet interface - except you read archived messages in Google Groups over a crummy web interface instead of something with RFC standardized protocols and formats and a variety of high-performance native clients specifically designed for browsing that sort of thing.
That said, the search is better.
Now get off my lawn.
This feels like the paradox of the new generation of tech tools. I find the new stuff much more accessible, but much less deep. And that's thinking of Google's web stuff that, on balance, is much better than others'. Search is magical, but I find myself much less productive than I was with some of the old generation email / newsgroup software, in spite of the fact that I've now probably logged more hours using the new stuff. Maybe I'm just less obsessive about really learning the tools as I've gotten older, or maybe the tools just have less depth.
Every company chat system should have at least two rooms - #business and #offtopic. Cutesey garbage goes into #offtopic; business goes to #business.
I've started using Trello and you know what, it's task-oriented paradigm of segmenting chats by breaking them into cards really works. It cuts the noise because each card is a topic. The topics can be rearranged in any logical form you choose. And when a task is done, well you might archive the card but it is essentially discarded from the collective thought stream. Maybe I'll end up hating it just as much as email. I haven't gotten there yet.
I acknowledge that having Too Much e-mail is terrible and frustrating. But I think this is the same as any other distracting time sink; e.g., agendaless face-to-face meetings, especially if organised on a daily or weekly cadence.
What, for me, is the root cause of the frustration is when I spend so much time feeling very busy, but getting nothing substantial done. This applies to any source of unlimited distractions: e-mail, meetings, chat, or even Twitter.
I think the solution to these problems is partially cultural. It has to be broadly understood that it is just fine to switch off IM and get some work done for a while. It's generally not polite to pounce on people at their desks; doing so over IM can be just as disruptive. Don't expect a response to e-mail as soon as you've hit send, and don't schedule endless meetings unless you've something to discuss.
This is mostly how things are at my workplace these days, and I feel much better as a result. Next up: following less people on Twitter!
Spot on advice...I've mostly done contract and full-stack (retainer) work for almost a decade, but there was a time when I'd be a year to 18 months on a gig...regular meetings even when there were no problems...no clear purpose...people dropping by asking, "did you get my email?", when they'd sent it maybe 10 minutes ago...
That's the pace of life now, apparently--click and swipe and fret, then go home thinking you've done a day's work...heh...
That's a great idea and would solve at least one of my frustrations with group chat.
There's very little productive going on in those group chats. Far more socializing than anything else. Memes in particular abound. And the interruptions are constant, driving my productivity to a fraction of what it should be otherwise.
Really, email was great, and 10 years of freelancing taught me to be a very good communicator on email (maybe even over communicating).
Now all that is ruined, and I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to bootstrap a software company so I'll no longer have to spend my days chatting about trivial matters on Slack when I have work to do.
People were vastly more careful about interrupting you via phone, in my experience. The careless way people interrupt on group chat is an extension of the general way people tend to dehumanize others online.
> I think you just have to clearly communicate that the group chat, in your case, doesn't benefit the working relationship.
Yes, I've not only said that, but proved it (by being extraordinarily productive during a 2-week "chat free" trial period). But the clients I deal with want me to be on chat, I'm guessing for the same reason that they'd really rather I work in their office. So the managers can monitor the hours I'm "clocked in" (nevermind what I actually accomplish during that time).
Basically, chat lets employers monitor their workers (even contract workers) in the same way that they monitor their workers in the office, by observing "butts in chairs".
> Slack, Google, and Apple all see the possibility of people overdosing on their services. Each offers its own “do not disturb” mode—Slack unveiled its version just last month—a message to fellow chatters that says you’re busy. The features let people read and respond to messages at their leisure, instead of in real time—which sounds a lot like e-mail.
So you can use group chat just like email when you need to, and as group chat when you need to. It's a very common practice (in my experience) to send a few rapid fire emails, and then switch to chat to discuss.
In future Group chat may evolve to be Slow-First, instead of Fast-First: Present an email style interface - no chat context, lots of white space, Subject line, etc. Then if you are both online and the recipient(s) respond quickly, dump the email stream into a chat window.
Or the other way around. When a conversation slows down to less than 1 reply per 5 minutes, it will quietly minimize itself and later archive itself.
Wasn't this the one of the central ideas of Google Wave?
Well, no. Email dates to about 1971. [1] In the 1987 timeframe, it was widely used within some walled gardens (my company at the time used email extensively within our own network with our proprietary software) and it was doubtless fairly widely used in various corners of the proto-Internet.
My recollection is that 1991 is still pretty early to call it "widely used" among the general public--although the "endless September" was in 1993 so perhaps it was getting close.
Chat will always be too temporary to compare to more manageable things like E-mail.
Was an entire conversation captured in the comments of a bug report? Was it captured in an E-mail thread? Was it discussed elsewhere? Or more likely, some crazy combination of all possible communication methods...
E-mail is only a problem because no one seems to improve the tools anymore. (Or they get worse.) There is plenty of room to innovate, still. Why, for instance, can I not even edit my E-mail subject lines...must I be forever cursed just because someone chose "Re: " as their entire subject? Also, it's great that E-mail clients usually correctly guess what a thread should be but why can't I manually intervene and make or modify my own threads? Why aren't there literally dozens of more options for rules and filtering?
A bit of a strange thing to say, and give no explanation. I think subject lines have been editable in every email system I've seen during the past 30 years.
The author also seems to exist in a world where group chat is only used for chit chat and cat pictures. If that's the case, You're Doing It Wrong. For me, Slack is the place where we communicate project state, hash out ideas, etc. That's the value.
If Slack admins go crazy on integrations, you can still get a lot of low-value notifications. In our instance, we only run integrations into topic-specific channels (such as a channel for system notifications) so it's manageable.
But I can see that changing as the scope of integrations grow.
While I think it will be hated at some point (we all blame our tools rather than our selves), not sure it'll be for what the author says.
Power of slack is in async public conversations with little friction and unified view/interface/features/etc. It's not really about saving time over all. It's about having clearer conversations and those savings over time of understanding better. Can't tell you how much having the person right there I could clarify right away and get answer was so much nicer than having to send a whole email which would feel like a waste (from UI and UX of email) so I'd need to get enough questions things to mention for it to be worth it.
Seize opportunities to take conversations out of the stream. I do this by maintaining an internal blog that's just a Google doc linked to other Google docs. If there's an idea or a plan that is important, I summarize the Slack conversation and flesh it out in a document, then put the document in the stream. The document has its own commenting system that avoids the stream: you can discuss any point in the conversation no matter what time you're jumping in. The individual documents are discoverable because they all link back to the doc that functions as the index page for the "blog."
It's a better way to think collectively. Someone should build a product around it.
People will try their best to be professional in work chat, they comment on ideas, share their thoughts about someone else work, and so on. But it's chat, I mean, it's CHAT! We all know that chat culture built up from the AOL era (or Yahoo in Asia..). One of a sudden, someone will have a casual comment about it, and then someone else, and then the whole group became casual. And then of course, there is the whole thing of scrolling back to get the context of what people are discussing.
Then teams make rules in chat for things to be in order. But well, if you can make people function strictly in chat, why don't just force them to a video meeting?
During the last month, this the only use case I have for group chat: "Let's lunch"
But if someone else dictates your availability on these platforms, then it becomes burdensome, even stressful.
And there can also be normative pressure. If most of your colleagues have no problem remaining available at all hours, then you will be expected to as well.
Sometimes I feel like workers are in a race to the bottom to see who can give up most of their personal time.
At the time Wave came out, I and another co-worker 'grokked' it and regularly found increasing more awesome uses for it. Soon others in the office were equally enamored. Even my mother enjoyed it! (My mother has a hate hate relation with most software.) Yet, I continued to see it dissed and dismissed by many others, and I never heard of another group that embraced it like we did.
Thank you for mentioning Rizzoma and Kune. I was unfamiliar with both of them but will be checking them out.
Manageably using IRC had a lot more benefit and preference to email.
There is no self-filtering, perfectly balancing communication technology for everyone's use case.
The tool is but one part of how you set it up and commit to using it, and managing it's use of you.
Group Chat is interesting, and hopefully will segment the type of chain emails that don't belong in email.
The link to the said research on how awesome face-to-face meetings is just leads to another article written by the same author. Sigh...