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Comment by webmaven | Hacker News Reader

> Our team members prefer just walking over to a colleague’s desk to address whatever is on their mind.

Of course. Nearly everyone prefers just walking up to a colleague.

However, nearly everyone also prefers that colleagues not just walk up to them.

I don't know. I'd rather have my colleagues walk up to me and fire a quick question when my quick answer saves them an hour of confusion. When that much time is saved (and it is quite often), it offsets the productivity loss of my flow break. (I might be particularly tolerant to interruptions because my flow is more resilient than average, though.)

When you have an answer and can give it quickly, the interruption is probably a net positive. But many times I have seen/caused someones "compulsive problem solver" trait being triggered and suddently you have five people googling for an answer and throwing around names of libraries that might be worth trying...

It requires discipline to say "sorry, can't help you" and to accept that response and go back to working on the problem on your own.

I used to work at a location where a certain individual was way above everyone else in knowledge, so he would be the "go-to" person for almost any issue with certain systems and platforms. He was too nice of a guy to say "no". It severely impacted his work some days because individuals would go to him instead of spending five to ten minutes troubleshooting on their own. Eventually our supervisor moved him to another room because it was impacting his performance so much (sometimes an hour a day of questions). It might be easy to say "sorry, can't help you" on paper, but in practicality it's nearly impossible when someone is standing two feet away from you and you already have the repertoire of being "that helpful guy".

Solution for this is twofold:

1 - Do ask questions through Slack, etc

2 - Do make sure you're responsive and if you're not don't complain people come and ask you directly

I don't think this will necessarily help. In my experience some people who use Slack consider responsiveness as getting an answer right away. This isn't that different from coming and asking directly - it still interrupts your current thinking process.

More important is to understand how async communication works. Otherwise, you have to create a physical boundary (remote work) to enforce this.

In my experience some people who use Slack consider responsiveness as getting an answer right away.

That's why I still fundamentally prefer e-mail (with a sensible set of mailing lists and an easily browsable archive) for serious decision making. IRC or Slack are great for building a community atmosphere but best reserved for more ephemeral things.

I fundamentally prefer Slack. I don't have threads of various conversations spread across multiple emails and replies, I also don't have to remember to add someone to a email thread, for example.

Also anyone that needs to be in a conversation is in the Slack already. File sharing, code sharing -- all that is much easier than email. With Threads -- conservations are more focused and organized. In-chat images are also super simple (as opposed to sharing actual images or links to images that require clicking as in email.)

I despise email and hate phone calls even more.

I think the 'problem' with Slack is how some people use it. The 'expectation' of a quick answer isn't Slack's fault.

In which case... you might as well be remote instead of in the office.

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