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In almost every retro I've been in, 'communication' has been near the top of the list of complaints. Everyone wants to be informed, but nobody wants to take the

In almost every retro I've been in, 'communication' has been near the top of the list of complaints. Everyone wants to be informed, but nobody wants to take the time to receive the information. For developers, every meeting is a interruption. Every email a distraction. Yet 'nobody ever tells us nothing'. I know there is a happy medium, but it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction these days.

enraged_camel 11y ago
For me, the happy medium is when meetings are appended or prepended to a lunch break. That way, they aren't so disruptive.
Karunamon 11y ago
There's often too much communication happening, most of it irrelevant to the people recieving it. I've got... 2000+ messages in my inbox right now, and get something like 100 or more per day. A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash. The rest are meetings, status request updates, and other folderol that has nothing to do with me, often nothing to do with my department, and was a waste of time for someone to enter my name into the address field. Or a waste of time for me to be on a specific group mailing list. rant mode on Group distro lists need to go away because it's too easy and too thoughtless to email people who don't know or care about what it is the other person is mailing about. It encourages the "Well, I need to make sure $group knows about $thing, so I'll just use $group_distro_list" mindset, even though $group_distro_list has over 100 people on it and perhaps only 1-5 care about the content of the message. Meetings. Roughly 90% of the meetings I get invited to don't concern me even tangentially. Of the remaining 10%, most of those could be handled over an email or IM. Email isn't used because, as mentioned before, it's a dumping ground for white noise. IM could be, and we're trying to get our PM's on board with that, but with with meeting subjects like: "You're on X Y and Z project, what is your status on this?" (repeated n times for n participants) - nothing that required disrupting the mental state of 10 or more people and bringing productivity to a halt for 2 or more hours. People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  > People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise. Maybe I'm lucky that I have a good manager, but if this were my situation, I'd escalate things to him and explain that it's hurting my productivity, and likely the productivity of everyone else I work with.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    Unfortunately my manager and just about everyone else in the department is in the same boat. There's just a culture of mail overuse here.
    - philbarr 11y ago
      I write an Outlook plugin for work, so if I've trashed the code by accident I don't receive any emails because Outlook isn't working. That's the excuse I use anyway.
- rokhayakebe 11y ago
  If you have 2000+ emails in your inbox, you need an assistant and/or you need to delegate. Most people who need an assistant do not realize they do. In fact I will say most people should have one, even if part time, even if in another economy where they can afford.
- krick 11y ago
  > A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash. So what's the problem? If I'm counting all automated alerts and notifications, reminders from bugtracker, VCS and CI, mailing lists and not that important stuff that happens to have my email in CC — there's probably much more than 100 emails per day. You know what? It doesn't really bother me. Thunderbird has filters for that. Since I have figured out what do I care about, my inbox is almost empty: all stuff gets sorted out by folders automatically, most of it marked as read immediately and most likely I won't even see it if something really unexpected doesn't happen; for another 50-80 I will read titles and occasionally skim through some of them if I feel like that, just to keep myself updated. I've got 10 emails left in my inbox to be sorted manually on the quiet day, only 3 of them turn out to be something important and will stay in the inbox for a while. So, with the help of filters and 20 specialized folders in the end of the day I'm left feeling almost lonely and longing for human communication. All that email isn't really noise for me, as it doesn't distract me from anything.
heynk 11y ago
I really appreciate well-curated and organized task lists for this. I know its unreasonable to be updated on every single project update, but if I can manually comb through updates and progress, I find it to be the best of both worlds. Of course, then you need the whole team to be on board and diligent about task tracking, but that's a different ballgame.

enraged_camel 11y ago

For me, the happy medium is when meetings are appended or prepended to a lunch break. That way, they aren't so disruptive.

Karunamon 11y ago

There's often too much communication happening, most of it irrelevant to the people recieving it. I've got... 2000+ messages in my inbox right now, and get something like 100 or more per day. A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash. The rest are meetings, status request updates, and other folderol that has nothing to do with me, often nothing to do with my department, and was a waste of time for someone to enter my name into the address field. Or a waste of time for me to be on a specific group mailing list. rant mode on Group distro lists need to go away because it's too easy and too thoughtless to email people who don't know or care about what it is the other person is mailing about. It encourages the "Well, I need to make sure $group knows about $thing, so I'll just use $group_distro_list" mindset, even though $group_distro_list has over 100 people on it and perhaps only 1-5 care about the content of the message. Meetings. Roughly 90% of the meetings I get invited to don't concern me even tangentially. Of the remaining 10%, most of those could be handled over an email or IM. Email isn't used because, as mentioned before, it's a dumping ground for white noise. IM could be, and we're trying to get our PM's on board with that, but with with meeting subjects like: "You're on X Y and Z project, what is your status on this?" (repeated n times for n participants) - nothing that required disrupting the mental state of 10 or more people and bringing productivity to a halt for 2 or more hours. People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
> People want communication, not noise. Irrelevant communication is noise. Maybe I'm lucky that I have a good manager, but if this were my situation, I'd escalate things to him and explain that it's hurting my productivity, and likely the productivity of everyone else I work with.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Unfortunately my manager and just about everyone else in the department is in the same boat. There's just a culture of mail overuse here.
  - philbarr 11y ago
    I write an Outlook plugin for work, so if I've trashed the code by accident I don't receive any emails because Outlook isn't working. That's the excuse I use anyway.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
If you have 2000+ emails in your inbox, you need an assistant and/or you need to delegate. Most people who need an assistant do not realize they do. In fact I will say most people should have one, even if part time, even if in another economy where they can afford.
krick 11y ago
> A lot of these are automated alerts for systems I don't manage, and so get rule-filed into the trash. So what's the problem? If I'm counting all automated alerts and notifications, reminders from bugtracker, VCS and CI, mailing lists and not that important stuff that happens to have my email in CC — there's probably much more than 100 emails per day. You know what? It doesn't really bother me. Thunderbird has filters for that. Since I have figured out what do I care about, my inbox is almost empty: all stuff gets sorted out by folders automatically, most of it marked as read immediately and most likely I won't even see it if something really unexpected doesn't happen; for another 50-80 I will read titles and occasionally skim through some of them if I feel like that, just to keep myself updated. I've got 10 emails left in my inbox to be sorted manually on the quiet day, only 3 of them turn out to be something important and will stay in the inbox for a while. So, with the help of filters and 20 specialized folders in the end of the day I'm left feeling almost lonely and longing for human communication. All that email isn't really noise for me, as it doesn't distract me from anything.

heynk 11y ago

I really appreciate well-curated and organized task lists for this. I know its unreasonable to be updated on every single project update, but if I can manually comb through updates and progress, I find it to be the best of both worlds. Of course, then you need the whole team to be on board and diligent about task tracking, but that's a different ballgame.