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It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not better than synchronous communic
by zby 1y ago
It is quite frustrating that we have these discussions over and over again. Asynchronous communication is great - but it is not better than synchronous communication in some universal way. It depends. Personally I am very sensitive to interruptions - so I lean towards asynchronous. But when you are doing something and you really need to get some information from someone to proceed - then getting his response immediately means that your work is not interrupted. The other person is - but it is a trade off. In a team you have to make these trade-offs. It can be hard - because it takes from one side and gives to the other - people would like to be able to interrupt others and not be interrupted themselves. And it is even more complicated by the fact that some jobs and some people are more sensitive to interruptions and others are less - so it is hard to make fair rules about it. But it is a real trade-off to be made.
UPDATE: Or take interactivity - a conversation is really powerful way of communicating. How a computer geek could even claim that asynchronous communication is always better - is he still using batch processors to run his jobs typing everything upfront and they waiting for the full run before he can fix his syntax errors?
- nottorp 1y agoUmm both email and instant messaging are as asynchronous or synchronous as you want to make them...
- n4r9 1y agoFor some reason, IM encourages people to send superficial quickfire messages, which is very inefficient if one party is busy. The classic example is Colleague: "Hi". One hour passes You: "Hey - what's up, can I help you with something?" 10 minutes pass Colleague: "Yeah I was wondering if I could ask you about Foo" One hour passes You: "Sure, what do you need to know?" Next day Colleague: "I'm trying to export but it's not working." One hour passes You: "Okay... Is it giving you any error messages? Please give me as much info as you can in one go!" etc...
- vel0city 1y agoI've pressed people who chat this way with me to change, and usually it seems people get it once they get shown how unproductive this kind of conversation is. Just ask me your question. Feel free to start with pleasantries if that's your style, but get to your point or the ask on the first message. https://nohello.net/en/ https://nohello.net/en/
- nottorp 1y agoI never answer hellos. That tends to teach people.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoInteresting. I write messages in Teams about the same way I write emails. Some people prefer splitting each sentence in a separate message, some keep the whole body as one. Email just nudges to send whole body at once because it usually doesn't have a synchronous chat UI.
- stared 1y agoThis. Also, even if responses are just 20 second after each, there is this constant context switching, which takes more time and attention that if we took literally any other method (in person, email or call).
- lostlogin 1y agoThere is the opposite too, which is just as bad. The stream of consciousness messaging. ‘Hi’ ‘I’m’ ‘Trying to get the’ ‘File’ ‘But’ ‘I’ ‘Need’ Etc etc and it’s 20 messages before you have any idea what’s going on. The deluge of notifications is distraction.
- AuthAuth 1y agoThis type of communication style would be a problem on any communication medium. The problem needs to be fixed at the user level.