I have empathy though, because I've had to break people's concentrations to urgently ping for information, too. It's always because my boss needed me to urgently get the information, and he's doing it because his boss needs to urgently get the informational and so on. Some senior VP somewhere makes an offhand remark about the status of Project X, and suddenly, 20 different managers are pinging their underlings for urgent information, breaking everyone's concentration.
I remember thinking it was odd that the engineer would think it was OK to be chatting with friends while he was supposed to be working, but I also thought it was odd that the boss was so pissed off about it. It’s not like we didn’t (physically, IRL) chat among ourselves about non-work stuff, too. As long as we were getting our work done, who cares? Now everyone has chat and social media on every device, include their own that they bring with them anywhere, including work.
I also remember that when I was a kid, I was never supposed to interrupt my father at work by calling him, unless it was an absolute real emergency, like the house burning down. Times have changed!
The worst was when a manager insisted I have it on. He was literally 3 cubes away from me (and always present). Why does he need to IM with me?! He was in his 50's, and had spent most of his career without such tools.
Another solution I now use since we're no longer in the office: If you ping me, I'll initiate a voice call. Async with constant notifications is a productivity killer. With a call, there is a fixed end point to the interruption.
In contrast, for the Boss to rattle some misguided text into Slack takes much less effort on the Boss's part and doesn't break the Boss's concentration, but the misunderstanding will be harder to clear up. If there is a back and forth it will take longer and be more distracting and stressful to the engineer, and if there isn't a back and forth the engineer is more likely wondering wtf the Boss is on about.
1. When they waltz over to my cube, they are also interrupting themselves, so they are an order less likely to do it (i.e. do it only when important).
2. IM notifications every few minutes is far more disruptive than a quick 1-5 minute conversation. When he leaves the cube, I can focus. With IM, if I respond, I don't know when, or even if, he will respond. That consumes some of the focus. And an IM session can last 30+ minutes because of the async nature.
3. It's my manager. If he IMs me and I don't respond, and it's important enough, he'll come to my cube anyway (and be annoyed/upset). I can't always know what is important to him or not. So async doesn't really work that well.
4. I don't need the mental burden of tracking which IM sessions have pending responses. Email is much easier to manage. So my policy tends to be: "If I don't respond soon after seeing it, assume it is forgotten and ping me again."
But I agree, overall it was a lot less distractions to get things done. On the other hand, the web had a lot less resources to get things done (this was before Stackoverflow), so if you stumbled into technical issues it took longer to resolve them.
*MSM not MSN
Fake meetings are fine until it is discovered you did a fake meeting. Then you get told not to do that again. They want the appearance of productivity -- they don't want productivity.
I genuinely never had that fear in any of the places I worked at (or heard of one!). If that is a cause for termination or being written up, I'd probably look for some place else.
> Fake meetings are fine until it is discovered you did a fake meeting
My meetings are titled "focus time". It’s purely there to communicate to other team members why I may be unavailable during those time. If people need me during that time, they just ask me beforehand and I’m happy to oblige.