8 ms·
Related thought, But how do we feel about people breaking their thoughts up? Into individually sent Messages? Like this? One Right after The other. Any
by dvtrn 6y ago
Related thought,
But how do we feel about people breaking their thoughts up?
Into individually
sent
Messages?
Like this?
One
Right after
The other.
Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations when colleagues communicate like this to be a real teeth grinder when you’re zeroed in on work (or trying to take a short pomodoro / coffee break and space out for a bit between tasks)?
- pirocks 6y agoI'm guilty of doing this. A large part of it is that I'm thinking of what to write as I write it and keeping on coming up with afterthoughts etc.
- dvtrn 6y agoInteresting. Have you observed others on your team doing the same-or is it something you pay attention to? I admit and understand not many people really care to notice the habit.
- kfrzcode 6y agoNope. Not my duty to modulate my communication to YOUR notification preferences. I say this as someone who has been working remote with various teams for nearly seven years. Crucial to the success of any remote team is feeling comfortable sharing and communicating via async and text based means. You can always just turn $SLACKISH off and actually focus. If you're on call or in a situation wherein you need to watch messages and respond immediately - you're not going to reach flow state anyways. Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings. I'll leave my bite sized messages for detailed threading, thanks!
- dvtrn 6y agoI’m not asking you or anyone to moderate or change anything about how you communicate, friend (entirely because I know how futile it is). Just idly pondering if others have similar reactions to it.
- kfrzcode 6y agoFair play! I have a tendency to take a hard-line on this relatively minor issue.
- goliatone 6y agoI can tolerate it if it’s through slack because I have set DND[1] but it really bothers me when people do that over SMS and I’m trying to concentrate. [1] I have a set of scripts that trigger do not disturb on macos center notification and sets my status on slack to do not disturb and other relevant services etc but I have not been able to automate my phone settings the same way.
- abeppu 6y ago> Do not disturb and other notification settings exist so you can decide when you get dings. Yeah, but an option which I think would smooth this situation which I never see available is "give me a notification when they've stopped adding messages for at least k seconds". If some of my teammates write chunky messages which are immediately actionable, I'm fine seeing the notification immediately. But if I put that in my settings, the a minority of people who send a stream of short drip messages which are only actionable when considered in aggregate seems super annoying.
- dredmorbius 6y agoCommunication should be done with an awareness of the audience / recipient. Respecting explicitly expressed preferences, if reasonably accommodated, is simple courtesy.
- _rs 6y agoI am just as annoyed at this as OP is, and yes when someone does this to me I mute their thread/messages. This is fine for me, but keep in mind you will get much slower replies from me since I will no longer see notifications for your messages, compared to people who don't do this.
- orliesaurus 6y agoI am extremely guilty of doing this!
- s_c_r 6y agoI’m horrible about this. I ask a question and then answer it, hold a whole conversation with myself and the poor recipient. Someone take away my Mattermost login!
- pndy 6y agoI had one friend who did that for years, it was always hard to read him. Surprisingly, after moving from local instant messenger (Gadu Gadu) to facebook messenger he started typing as everyone else. No idea why.
- uryga 6y agowild guess: iirc GaduGadu ran in a small popup window. small windows encourage short messages? edit: i guess FB shows chats in a small popup too, forgot about it bc i always use the big interface @ messenger.com (hejka, zawsze smiesznie spotkac tu kogos z pl!)
- pndy 6y agoThe original facebook chat had a small windows in the bottom right corner so that wouldn't be it; guess the guy changed himself over the years. Hej o/
- TavsiE9s 6y agoI just do something else while they type like that and will get back to the chat whenever I remember.
- molsongolden 6y agoSometimes very guilty of this but I've done the "type as I think" then "end up figuring out the answer before I finish explaining my question" enough times that I now make an effort to fully form my question before sending. The exercise of trying to concisely explain the situation and form the question is frequently enough to sort out a path forwards. Not all coworkers enjoy being used as a chat-based rubber duck!
- fivre 6y agoI blame the chat apps more for this tbh. Coming from a long history of using IRC, using separate messages is a completely normal way of dividing up one's text, and it was fine because N lines of text in a single message wasn't hugely different from N lines of text over multiple messages. For the most part, the end result takes up the same amount of screen real estate, and I honestly like being able to send out thoughts piecemeal in a more active discussion--it lets others start priming their response before I'm done, or read through it as it's being said, versus having to wait for a complete set of messages. It's really one of the differentiating features that made me prefer chat over email or forums back in the day. Slack, Discord, etc. wander in and turned chat into a _product_, and specifically a modern mAxImIzE eNgAgEmEnT product. No fucking chat app should send as many notifications as Slack and Discord do default, and they also shouldn't return to the same noisy default every time you join a new server, but they do. There's a good reason for this: constant pings make you use the app more because human brains are easily distracted, doubly so when something has been crafted to grab your attention. This probably results in a mix of actual stickiness and garbage interaction stats that product managers toot in internal meetings to demonstrate how good their ping flood is to clueless upper management, but the end result is that the distractathon defaults are just accepted as the way things are.
- chc 6y agoTo me, that's fine if you're actually having a conversation (i.e. that chat window is likely to be in the foreground). It can be a case of using spare bandwidth to minimize latency, so to speak. But it's terrible if the thread is meant to be in async mode. Overall, I think the problem here isn't the method of communication, per se. It's people placing unreasonable demands on your attention. Someone who came up to you in the middle of your break and started rambling a vague request would be annoying in the same way, even though the method of demanding your attention is different.
- baby 6y agoBut that’s not the person’s fault: it’s the medium. Chat is about chatting, it’s not a mail, it’s not a letter, it’s an impromptu chat.
- smabie 6y agoIt lowers the latency of the communication and also makes the text easier to read. Before you've finished typing it all out, your co-worker has already started processing and thinking about the question. This is superior than just sending one big block of text.
- scarface74 6y agoI would much rather have the wall of text. Whenever I get to the message, I can process it without asking a million of follow up questions.
- smabie 6y agoWhy would you need a follow up question more for a bunch of lines of text vs a block of text? We're talking about putting a bunch of new lines (i.e sending many messages) vs sending just one large one. They can contain the exact same information.
- dvtrn 6y agoWhy do many comments in response to my initial question default to the alternative being gigantic blobs of text and not advocating for merely brief and concise but informative communication styles? Is it no less valid than the rapid fire messaging on the one extreme and large paragraphs of words on the other?
- neckardt 6y agoFor me this depends on the context: 1. On the first message of a conversation I prefer a wall of text, because that lets me read all of the details really quickly. 2. If the conversation is likely to be short I prefer the one message after another since my attention is already on the chat, and I might as well be reading what they're typing rather than watching the "x is typing..." indicator. 3. If the conversation is going to be long I much prefer a call, I don't have the time to wait for someone to type all day. Context switches are expensive so I don't like reading occasional long messages while I'm trying to work.
- 6y ago
- ilaksh 6y agoIt depends. If they are just typing fast and have real sentences on each line then that's different from two words per line like you showed. But I think personally that for cognitive work it's actually necessary to be able to turn notification sounds off and ignore chat sometimes if it is used routinely. And if the employer didn't understand then I would try to get another job if possible.
- baby 6y agoThat’s me!
- brushfoot 6y agoLove it. It lets us interrupt each other so we don't waste time if one of us "gets it" before the other. Plus it keeps attention from straying when the conversation is semi-critical but not critical enough for a call. A coworker of mine does the opposite: 10 minutes of "X is typing...." The result is a finely crafted paragraph. But we could've done without 90% of it because I would've had an answer for him after the first sentence.
- scubbo 6y ago> the constant badgering of dings and vibrations I agree that this spacing-out is annoying, but...there's an easy way to solve this problem at receiver-end.
- hnick 6y agoI like it. The reason is that sometimes I will see "X is typing...." and it seems to last 5 minutes and I don't know if the app just messed up because they bumped space by mistake and left to get a coffee or if they are actually slowly composing their thoughts in their version of correct capitalisation and grammar. Breaking it up lets me get to the point quicker than they do, and I'm ready with a reply by the time they're finished (or cut them off when it's appropriate and they're going down the garden path). The dings are annoying but that's a problem with the chat apps. I turn off sound on my work laptop usually anyway. And personally, I got into this habit in online games before voice chat and we all moved this over to ICQ/IRC and the habit stuck. It now feels very inefficient to do it the other way.
- glandium 6y agoThe first thing I did in Slack is to disable "X is typing" messages. I wish Riot/Element would allow the same.
- nomoreservices 6y agoI think it's a matter of what kind of IM culture you grew up with. As a kid and young adult I used IRC and messengers that limited message size, so doing that was pretty common and everyone did it. My younger co-workers who only seem to have known Slack and the likes find it really annoying.
- flukus 6y ago> Anyone else find the constant badgering of dings and vibrations Aside from the obvious issues with the annoying by default clients this is an unfortunate regression in desktop/mobile environments, they offer very little in the way of passive notifications. Silence and changes to the system tray icon used to handle this with a minimum of annoyance but now everything has to play a sound, flash the window or send a notification.