Comment by tobych | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobych | Hacker News Reader

I am, it seems, in the market for this. But...

I don't want to be alerted unless something is important and urgent. I was taught at college to use that distinction.[1]

Not seeing the word "urgent" in the copy on the front page made me think the authors don't appreciate this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...

At the risk of sounding like that bloke who wrote about how he wants to be playing offense, not defense, when it comes to communication, this is what I tell people I work with:

Important/Urgent: Call me or come find me

Important/Not Urgent: Tell me when we next talk, or email me

Unimportant/Urgent: Hover by my desk, or message me. If I'm not dealing with more important things, I might see it in time.

Unimportant/Not Urgent: Bring it up when we next see each other, or email me.

The only things I want making a noise and interrupting me is calls on my phone, the doorbell, my egg-timer and my smoke alarm.

(I work at Quill.) Yes! That's exactly how we think about it. By default, @-mentions _will not_ notify you, and instead end up in your activity feed. And if something is truly urgent, we have priority notifications (!!-mentions) which will send a notification. (They have a higher cost, and make it very clear that it will cause disruption on the other end.)

We think of it as bringing the way people behave in person, online. If you have headphones on, working away, and I have a low priority question, I'll find you later. But if I just brought down prod, I urgently need to reach you :)

It's beyond me that the culture at my current company doesn't understand this concept, so a few months into my tenure here, I took matters into my own hands and turned do-not-disturb on in my Slack and informed my team.

It was pretty vindicating to see multiple staff engineers follow my lead haha; when you get to a certain level of responsibility, the volume of Slack pings from people who need something from you makes it impossible to do any focused work.

The real problem here is that my co doesn't use email for things that aren't time-sensitive; avoiding email means removing the async channel, so my only option was to convert Slack to async.

The recent switch to remote has been challenging though, since there's no pressure valve of "come by my desk if it's time-sensitive". Slack's DnD mode has a "notify Anyway" option, but I've found that only higher-ups are comfortable using it, even though my status says "please feel free to notify".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com