In addition to that, I can hold multiple "real time" conversations at once with IM, whereas with video chat I'm glued to a single topic.
These days I check my email about once a week. I do almost everything business oriented over IM.
These days I check my email about once a week. I do almost everything business oriented over IM.
It's still a mystery to me why people so often prefer it over the traditional phone, which has better audio and reliability and doesn't force everyone to regulate their posture, get in a professional looking location, etc
Also I feel that on video chat it is way easier to interject (if the camera is set up properly) than on a audio call with multiple people.
That has not been my experience. Generally the audio suffers as the compression algorithm switches to accommodate poor network performance.
This all might be moot if you're on the same LAN, such as in the same office (that is, until you have dozens or hundreds of video chats eating up the bandwidth). But add in folks in another location and/or working remotely, and video chat is just terrible.
See the McGurk Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
Now, I'm not sure what video chat tool you're referring to, but POTS audio is awful, even the more modern stuff available for cell-to-cell isn't great unless you happen to have VoLTE - any halfway decent mic and modern audio codec will be much better.
It's not an "awkward middle ground", it's the "perfect middle ground"
Whereas if I have to wait for them to become free to talk to me, I have to keep all the context in my head, which interferes with my work, because my mind has a limited amount of "cache". Also, I now have to be on constant semi-alert waiting for the call because I don't know when they will become free. That makes it impossible to concentrate on any task too much. I am certainly not getting "into the zone" on anything.
Cognitive load is a real thing, do not waste yours or someone else's.
To me IM replaces the “I could spend an hour searching for something or just pop up at your desk and ask”. It’s better because I can, like you say, defer answering for a few minutes.
In my previous job we had Slack, with General and Random channels. The discussion often went awry in these. Later we decided to create channels per team and more or less forbidden non work related chat. This basically fixed all of our problems with lost productivity and random pokes. Since people were not constantly on chat for random reasons, they did not use it for trivial work related stuff either.