Yes Hello
yeshello.org
yeshello.org
a) Asynchronous communication happens over email. You work with people who know how to search their email, and how to write an email that explains context, spells out their ask, and addresses possible counter arguments. Your colleagues understand that you check email no more than a few times per day,
b) Synchronous communication happens over a telephone, where you can decide to turn your phone off if you are unavailable, and if somebody tries to get ahold of you while you're talking to someone else, they get a busy signal,
c) Institutional knowledge is written into a knowledge base that can be searched and read by people joining you for the first time,
d) If for some reason, none of the above work, then you can put yourself on somebody's calendar to ask for their full attention and focus, providing context in the calendar invite so that they can prepare for the meeting beforehand,
e) If you don't have your email open, turn your phone off, aren't getting push notifications from your knowledge base (because they're self-organized in your email, thanks to a filter rule you wrote), and aren't sitting in a meeting, then you can finally, mercifully, _focus_
Imagine how much calmer you would be.
Jokes aside, I long for such world.
Your comment does remind me of what we strive to do with communication at Automattic. Since a team can be split all over the world, synchronous communication is never a given. Though email is rarely used, we do use P2. Basically, each team has a blog. You write posts to provide significant context and shape discussion around a certain project or problem. Others comment on those posts in long-form text as needed. This is all searchable by any member of the company, unlike email! And then we also have a knowledge base for documentation. (Basically just a WordPress site where you write pages about different topics.)
So if you need to find context and past conversations about X, you can easily search for that.
We do skip step B, and “synchronous” communication happens in Slack. Even then, it’s still async. I’ll message a teammate today and have no expectation they would respond until their timezone comes around again. If needed, it would be a video call. Plus, Slack messages are also aggregated into the internal search tool.
I think there isn’t much need for a “busy signal” when there’s no cultural expectation for anyone to be immediately available for conversations.
This situation is far superior than other remote setups I’ve seen, but does it make you calmer?
Maybe! I find that the stuff that affects calmness is emotional or psychological. I can’t just log off and be disconnected — my brain still spends cycles thinking about problems. That can’t be solved with better communication systems. It’s just hard to stop thinking about work, since it consumes so much of your day!
Recall the original article. When you do async communication in Slack, you're encouraging laziness in the sense that people will just write "Hello" as if it were synchronous communication. Email encourages people to write full letters for asynchronous communication. This improves the quality of asynchronous communication, compared to Slack.
If you engage in synchronous communication over Slack, then you're engaging in a relatively inefficient way to communicate synchronously compared to a telephone / video call or meeting. Furthermore, unless you sit in a formal meeting, you rarely have the knowledge base open in front of you to be edited as part of the meeting, thereby ensuring that the meeting produced something. If you allow synchronous communication to happen over Slack, then yes, that's searchable, but unless it happens in a public channel, it's not searchable by everyone, and Slack makes it too easy to screenshot discussion, promoting cover-your-ass behavior even for one-off statements made during "synchronous" discussion.
In short, Slack is an anti-tool.
You can say hello and be respectful/productive/not selfish at the same time.
>> Hello, I'm working on [something] and I'm trying to do [etc]. Please help.
>> Sure, the answer is [answer]
>> Thank you!
I really appreciate a “Good morning” if chatting before working hours.
Still, the question can be added in the same message to cut down on the wait time for an answer.
you: Hi coworker, I'm working on [something] and I'm trying to do [etc]
coworker: Hi you, Oh, that's [answer]
With my family (in Ireland) there are generally about 17 goodbyes ('bye', 'bye bye', 'bye bye bye'...)
Much better.
Either way, it's certainly better than the situation presented here!
i feel like there is a joke i dont get (or dont find funny) or I am being trolled. This is a waste of time.. yet i'm still trying to figure it out...
Look at the timestamps. It's a parody of NoHello.
Don't think either has its place on HN. Gatekeeping drivel. Use comms how you want to use comms.
The issue is with how other people use comms with oneself.
By that logic spam is okay?
In proper async communication, you give the complete message in one shot. Like in email. That to me is way, way more important than whether you say hello (although definitely feel free to open with that).
If you just say "hello", it's basically telling the recipient "I am trying to get your attention to have a synchronous conversation". Which is obviously antithetical to an efficient async culture. Especially if you take THREE FREAKING DAYS to finish the conversation you implied would be synchronous.
that's assuming that the point of being at a job is indeed to do a job, and not to give us a semblance of socialization in a capitalistic system with millions of people working bullshit jobs
> Which is obviously antithetical to an efficient async culture.
efficient async culture is maybe antithetical to many human beings
Hi, I'm working on [project] and ran into [issue].
FTFY