In the example given, there is 1 minute between the "Hi" and the question. If 1 minute makes or breaks getting things done in time, you do not have a white collar job, you have a fast paced labor job similar to that of a worker on a factory room floor.
Food for thought.
That means with text there's an idle period between the "hello" packet and the followup. Just seeing the greeting and having to decide whether to wait, respond or ignore it is an annoyance that does not exist in spoken conversation.
It's not about the time itself, it's about the uncertain, possibly unbounded latency and the context-switching.
In fact text is not just higher-latency, it also has a lower bandwidth. It's really important to use it efficiently.
For a bit reduced latency and higher throughput they could implement liveposting as some imageboards do[0].
You are doing productive thing x. Person A sends you a hello message and your chat app pings you. You go to look at chat and now you are staring at an empty chat window for the minute or more it takes for person A to actually ask what they could have sent already.
I honestly think you can treat "conversations" in a chat program as more like email. Sure, some of the time you can get a conversation going, but if you don't already have a continuous conversation going then create a fully self contained message
Worse, you're trying to figure out if it's worth refilling your short term memory with the things you just dropped when you checked on the chat.
It's not a minute of boredom, it's a minute of having too much in your brain but you're uncertain if it's worth it to stop the effort or not.
It's similar one of your sibling comments which compares a chat message to a person walking up and saying "hello"... They are absolutely not equivalent; it's perfectly alright to not immediately respond to every message you get (or even only giving it a bit of your attention), even if they are not emails.
I wonder if this is a generational thing...
I was essentially conceding that clearly others are not as able to switch contexts easily.
No matter how the person asks their question your flow is going to be interrupted the moment you open your chat apps. If the person says hello then asks a question a minute later your flow is broken. If the person asks the question right away now you're answering the question and your flow is, just as likely, broken.
As far as flow interruptions are concerned, it's not the fault of the person asking a question but rather the invasive design or reliance on chat, or your own patterns of chat consumption.
The real solution to this problem isn't to impose some kind of rule that people should stop spending an extra minute to be polite, but rather that we should all adopt conscious consumption patterns around chat, i.e. setting aside time each day when you focus strictly on work and ignore chats for x hours (your role permitting). Rather than letting the chat notifications dictate when you attend to them, you should dictate when you attend to chat notifications, and if it means breaking some important flow you have going the chat can probably wait.
Edit: I suppose the only exception to this is when the question is something that requires a one word answer and can be answered instantaneously, but if that's the case that's probably a sign you have larger communication problems in that things that are easily answerable are in the heads of workers and not stored in some uniformly accessible place.
`sleep 60`
Because one interruption takes x amount of time to deal with and the other interruption takes x + 60 seconds of staring at a chat window that FEELS like 3 times as long
Of course there are some roles that require immediate attention to chat messages when they come in, for example if you’re on call or something, but for the majority of jobs you don’t have to answer right away. Instead of focusing on our own consumption patterns and lack of discipline/restraint we like to blame others because it’s easier—if you’re in the middle of something wait to get to the chat until you’ve reached a good break point.
This is why it’s also good to adopt rules of use for different communications tech, e.g. x chat channel is to be avoided except for emergencies, or DMs are assumed to be casual and important stuff must be relegated to certain channels etc etc.
It is rightfully expected that one gets on with it and says what one has further to say, and in less than sixty seconds from the initial "hello".
Much better for the question to be directly asked, so that the person can respond asynchronously when at a convenient stopping point.
Also note that asking directly doesn’t preclude being polite with “hello - mind if I ask you a question? <insert question>. Thanks in advance!”
Um, if you think there's a connection between a job being "white collar" and not caring whether or how long one's focus is broken, you may want to look into getting a better job.
I'm fortunate enough to have made and saved a lot more money than I need, so a big part of what motivates my career drive and keeps ending my sabbaticals is that getting sufficiently difficult intellectual challenges in front of me is a lot easier in a corporate environment. It turns out that most of these require sustained concentration: interrupt-based communication destroys the ability to do this work, and drawing out the length of the interrupt exacerbates it.
In fact, you have your example precisely backwards: if I worked on a factory floor and someone interrupted me, the cost of the interruption is going to be a lot closer equal to the length of the interrupt (with no second-order effects), since one's time is a lot more fungible.
If I get a 'hello', now I don't know what the situation is, and it might go a few different ways. More distracting.
When someone grabs my attention to ask a question but leaves me idle for a moment, I'm left to wait. I don't get back to what I'm doing because I'll be pulled away from it shortly. The back and forth is very mentally taxing.
I'd love for it to be different but in my experience it's a physical limitation, just the way I am.
How could I go into a think tank for example? Or whatever that needs problem solving, but does not equate with sitting on my ass in front of a screen for hours.
For now I'm saving money to try building multitenent CLT housing.
Grass is greener...?