> In another post, I make a case for never, ever asking "are you there?" in Slack[0]. It's been popular for my friends who work on remote teams inside of larger

> In another post, I make a case for never, ever asking "are you there?" in Slack[0]. It's been popular for my friends who work on remote teams inside of larger non-remote companies. Working in management, I hated this strategy so much. 1. if i reply and the other person then writes their question right away, a reply from me is expected immediately, as we already in a "conversation" (but I might have other things to do) 2. if i somehow don't see it or see it much later, some potentially important information or question did not get conveyed - and it could take equally long for the person to see my reply and finally write out what they want At some point I had to turn off slack notifications completely as I couldn't get anything done without getting super distracted by them (to the point that I was feeling phantom vibrations from my phone) and anyone who asked if i was there would hit case 2. I did try to explain to people that this kind of question didn't really make sense but I guess many see slack is a social chat tool like any other where such practices are common - and not a tool to distribute information in a company to the relevant recipients in an informal and instant yet often asynchronous way.