Interesting example, but for me it is the exact opposite. Please be brief and to the point, I do not care if you (pretend) to care about my dog.
It is just fine to lead with hi, as long as it arrives at the same time as everything else.
They learn quickly.
I haven't got time in my life to carefully and delicately walk around people's feelings with every single small work matter. If someone takes something like a link to nohello very personally, you've got to fix that relationship.
So in the spirit of being direct, your attitude has probably caused issues in your personal life and career that you are not aware of, and has probably created a reputation in your company as 'the grumpy/rude one'. It's not that much more work to be polite and your attitude probably spreads to other actions in your work.
You would learn fast when you have someone looking at your screen and receiving "have you slept with Jenny yet?", or "you should not have called Jack a dick" when Jack is with you.
If you have someone looking over your shoulder, you silencing all notifications.
But why would you send crazy gossip like that anyway? Please just keep things work related so we can all focus on producing results.
Please keep all messages strictly work related!
Good luck with that when you have 5 or 10 messaging systems.
> But why would you send crazy gossip like that anyway?
It was obviously to show an extreme. replace this with confidential business information and there you are.
How did you realize it? I'm asking because you sound a lot like myself.
But I think these differences are absolutely needed and the evolution kind of selected this approach for the world to move forward. Also, even if this world had come this far with only 1 trait I believe it would have been pretty boring place to be.
Maybe this is generational, but to me that's just the basic social contract?
I remember visiting a friend in North Carolina, and as we were walking a complete stranger asked "How are you?". Without missing a beat my friend nods and asks "How are you?" in reply and continues on... and apparently that was normal to him.
It's not really about asking someone to dump their troubles on your plate, it's about acknowledging the person before you make an ask.
As long as you're not pinging someone multiple times over it, I don't see an issue. The idea is just don't make someone switch contexts a bunch of times over niceties
Adding a bit of context to your messages might seem like unnecessary padding, but people loose context, multitask, and read stuff asynchronously. Restoring that context helps a lot.
As for the small talk, I think its very important what information you communicate. If you say “how was your weekend” what you usually are communicating is “I have no idea who you are, and want to warm up to your graces so you are more likely to do the work I actually want you to do” People hate that.
But if you ask them “how is your dog doing? I’ve heard it got its ear bit off that time hope they’re ok” Now you’ve communicated “I’m actually interested in who you are as a person, and what your life is. The work bit is nice to have but secondary” People do pick up on that, especially if you do it _without_ work requests from time to time. You trigger all the “they are part of my tribe” responses and will get your answers much quicker later.
It’s just very important to care about the people behind the handles and avatars, and establish connections with them.
Writing itself is an art form. Its important to have tldr; sections, to consider your audience and not to just braindump and call it a day.
At the end of the day though most orgs live or die by how aligned are their members, and how tenacious they are. Both of which require information to flow through it. And I think its way easier to tone things down/ignore/filter if you have too much than to try to infer “what other people actually mean”.
99% of people would prefer their colleagues talk to them in a friendly, humanizing way after spending 7 or 8 hours a day on their own though. On the whole people are social animals, and we get depressed when we're 'forced' to spend time alone, or even in groups if the group is exclusively focused on a task.
There are people who don't want that social aspect in their work life for various reasons, but they're unusual. The advice here is aimed at most people, not you specifically.