But how do we feel about people breaking their thoughts up?
Into individually
sent
Messages?
Like this?
One
Right after
The other.
Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations when colleagues communicate like this to be a real teeth grinder when you’re zeroed in on work (or trying to take a short pomodoro / coffee break and space out for a bit between tasks)?
Slack, Discord, etc. wander in and turned chat into a _product_, and specifically a modern mAxImIzE eNgAgEmEnT product. No fucking chat app should send as many notifications as Slack and Discord do default, and they also shouldn't return to the same noisy default every time you join a new server, but they do. There's a good reason for this: constant pings make you use the app more because human brains are easily distracted, doubly so when something has been crafted to grab your attention. This probably results in a mix of actual stickiness and garbage interaction stats that product managers toot in internal meetings to demonstrate how good their ping flood is to clueless upper management, but the end result is that the distractathon defaults are just accepted as the way things are.
Plus it keeps attention from straying when the conversation is semi-critical but not critical enough for a call.
A coworker of mine does the opposite: 10 minutes of "X is typing...." The result is a finely crafted paragraph. But we could've done without 90% of it because I would've had an answer for him after the first sentence.
This is superior than just sending one big block of text.
1. On the first message of a conversation I prefer a wall of text, because that lets me read all of the details really quickly.
2. If the conversation is likely to be short I prefer the one message after another since my attention is already on the chat, and I might as well be reading what they're typing rather than watching the "x is typing..." indicator.
3. If the conversation is going to be long I much prefer a call, I don't have the time to wait for someone to type all day. Context switches are expensive so I don't like reading occasional long messages while I'm trying to work.
Is it no less valid than the rapid fire messaging on the one extreme and large paragraphs of words on the other?
Breaking it up lets me get to the point quicker than they do, and I'm ready with a reply by the time they're finished (or cut them off when it's appropriate and they're going down the garden path).
The dings are annoying but that's a problem with the chat apps. I turn off sound on my work laptop usually anyway.
And personally, I got into this habit in online games before voice chat and we all moved this over to ICQ/IRC and the habit stuck. It now feels very inefficient to do it the other way.
Overall, I think the problem here isn't the method of communication, per se. It's people placing unreasonable demands on your attention. Someone who came up to you in the middle of your break and started rambling a vague request would be annoying in the same way, even though the method of demanding your attention is different.
Aside from the obvious issues with the annoying by default clients this is an unfortunate regression in desktop/mobile environments, they offer very little in the way of passive notifications. Silence and changes to the system tray icon used to handle this with a minimum of annoyance but now everything has to play a sound, flash the window or send a notification.
But I think personally that for cognitive work it's actually necessary to be able to turn notification sounds off and ignore chat sometimes if it is used routinely. And if the employer didn't understand then I would try to get another job if possible.
The exercise of trying to concisely explain the situation and form the question is frequently enough to sort out a path forwards.
Not all coworkers enjoy being used as a chat-based rubber duck!
My younger co-workers who only seem to have known Slack and the likes find it really annoying.
I agree that this spacing-out is annoying, but...there's an easy way to solve this problem at receiver-end.
edit: i guess FB shows chats in a small popup too, forgot about it bc i always use the big interface @ messenger.com
(hejka, zawsze smiesznie spotkac tu kogos z pl!)
Hej o/
I say this as someone who has been working remote with various teams for nearly seven years.
Crucial to the success of any remote team is feeling comfortable sharing and communicating via async and text based means.
You can always just turn $SLACKISH off and actually focus. If you're on call or in a situation wherein you need to watch messages and respond immediately - you're not going to reach flow state anyways.
Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings.
I'll leave my bite sized messages for detailed threading, thanks!
Yeah, but an option which I think would smooth this situation which I never see available is "give me a notification when they've stopped adding messages for at least k seconds".
If some of my teammates write chunky messages which are immediately actionable, I'm fine seeing the notification immediately. But if I put that in my settings, the a minority of people who send a stream of short drip messages which are only actionable when considered in aggregate seems super annoying.
[1] I have a set of scripts that trigger do not disturb on macos center notification and sets my status on slack to do not disturb and other relevant services etc but I have not been able to automate my phone settings the same way.