I totally agree with the dude, but that sounds pretentious af
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Here's the thing. If it's from someone internal, we have instant messaging if say u want some kind of message instantly. If I get an email, I'm assuming I have time to action it. If I'm not busy, sure, I'll action it right away, but if I am and I see an email come in from someone internal not marked high importance, there's a good chance I'm not even reading it for like 2-3 hours maybe more. I absolutely hate when someone sends an email and a follow up like an hour later. If it's urgent, u need to convey that in some way, shape, or form.
instant messaging
Yeah, screw that. If it's urgent, call me or walk by my desk. I'll read IMs when I get to them. Not breaking up my workflow for every little thing.
Eh I'm remote so going to people's desk isn't an option. IM is the closest thing I've got. Imo since Covid, calling someone without IMing 1st to ask if they're free for a call isn't really kosher at least in our office.
Sure, but don't expect an instant answer to an IM.
As any email address will eventually become unusable due to spam.... An email is a very ineffective way to communicate. Eventually every address becomes abandoned
It's interesting to read the comments here. Without taking a stance, it looks like everyone has a different personal experience in terms of how fast their life circle expects them to respond digitally.
I see it as two types of people.
Managers expect quick responses. They jump into meetings. They ask for frequent status updates. They're pissed when you ignore them for a day.
Makers need time to think and create. They code for hours of uninterrupted time. They're generating art or fine tuning a song. Asking for a status update is an interruption, and every interruption isn't a lost moment, but a severe disruption.
You're seeing that in the comments. Some are makers. Some are managers. We both require different things.
You can read more about it here: Makers vs managers schedule
Being able to prioritize what needs to be done now and what could take 4 days, and what can simply not be done is an art.
Both on the sender and de receiver.
This seems really pompous and self important to me. Most people know to not expect an immediate response. I know it’s a joke but to say “it will take me 4 days to acknowledge you” is strange.
While I agree, I understand their sentiment.
Nobody deserves a response.
I tend to surround myself with people who are chill, and immediately drop off anyone who responds/reacts quickly.
I met a person at a meetup and connected. The next day, I had 3 text responses with small talk. Like "Hey what's up?" "What's your day like?" "How is work?" Fuck that, chill. they're a perfect candidate for this.
I accidentally logged on Facebook to fix a permission and almost instantly, I get bombarded with messages that I log off. Apparently me avoiding a message was so hostile that one of them proceeded to call me asking why Im ignoring them. Like damn, chill. I'll message you when I'm ready.
They gotta have time to watch that 12 hours of tiktok before the respond.
Almost 2 decades ago I figured out that, from the very start in a new job, you have to train others to not expect constant availability and immediate response from you.
Things like "work phone and work e-mail are only for work hours" and only checking e-mails once in a while rather than being a slave-to-notifications interrupting anything I might be doing to check any e-mail coming in and replying to it (if you know the psychology of effective working, externally driven frequent interruptions is one of the most unproductive ways to work and is needlessly stressful).
It's pretty hard getting away with changing this later after people have already baked in expectations about your "availability" (personally, I never succeeded in that), but it works if you're doing this kind of "flow control" up front and reliably do eventually get around to look into and addressing whatever people sent you - in fact you're likely more reliable than those providing "immediate availability" because it's a lot easier to have things under control and naturally prioritise by importance, so important stuff won't just "fall to the bottom of the pile" because a bunch of fresh requests came in distracting you away from the more important stuff and you forgot about it.
There are other, more indirect upsides, such as "shit they can solve themselves" from other people seldom getting to you because they know you won't immediatelly drop everything to solve any problem of theirs, so won't just mail you and sit on their arses waiting and instead have a go or two at it themselves and "self-solving problems" (the kind of stuff that turns out not to be a problem but instead a misinterpretation or are caused by temporary conditions elsewhere and out of your control) solving themselves before you get around to looking into them,
That said, I do have a hierarchy of access, with e-mails being treated as less urgent and phone calls as more urgent, though even in the latter I'll consistently (consistency is important in managing other people's expectations) push back - i.e. "send me an e-mail and I'll look into it when I have availability" - if somebody calls me with stuff that's not important and urgent enough to justify using that "channel".
All this to say that for me what's in this post just looks like a more advanced version of what I do for time management, productivity and stress control.
I learned this when I got into Tech Support and switched to an engineer.
TechSupport. I was on tickets all the time so if you ping me on teams I'd ping back immediately if I was free or within 2 min if I was on a call.
Engineer? Nope. Might get a ping back before lunch if you're lucky. I prefer not to break my concentration scripting. It fucks upy flow.
Well, that's the thing: in customer facing (even if it's an internal "customer") occupations there's usually no other choice but be driven by external timings, but if you're doing software development or any other kind of thinking/creation work, frequent interruptions just break your concentration, pull you out of Flow (the psychological state of maximum productivity), force you to mentally switch tracks (a form of overhead cost) and often make you lose track of what you're doing, not to mention being a source of unecessary stress.
Unfortunatelly, whilst some are good, plenty of Engineering environments and managers are pretty bad when it comes to recognizing the costs of frequent interruptions and supporting a maximum productivity environment, from the systemic corporate-wide problem which is "open space" work areas to managers who themselves are overstressed firefighters with poor time, impulse and prioritization control, the kind of reactive unstructured behaviour that ends up disrupting everybody else's work flow.
I have such passionate hate for open space work environments. Even the proported benefits are bullshit. It doesn’t improve communication, I still have to get up and talk to the person across from me. Between me being an engineer and needing to think when I’m at my desk to my coworker who has frequent phone calls to my coworker who likes to eat his pungent lunches at his desk (he routinely eats horseradish there and takes a different lunch time than I do), my desk can be rendered unusable for focused work on a regular basis. An office would just solve that issue and a cubicle would greatly improve it.
Also it’s awkward doing creative work out in the open. I prefer closed spaces for it