Instant messaging can save a lot of time at work. Instead of walking over to a person’s desk and disturbing their workflow, we can send a message to get a quick response. If we’re not careful though, chatting at work can affect overall productivity. I’ve jotted down the limitations and benefits of IM. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just a few of them I’ve felt strongly about.
Limitations
There are a few attributes of work chat that have been introduced in the latest products that can do more harm than good.
Rooms / Channels
This is a common feature found in most applications. Rooms share similar limitations to WhatsApp groups - there are conversations that are not relevant for everyone in the group, yet they are notified. Also, being part of a room implies an added responsibility of keeping tabs on what’s going on and deciding whether or not to participate. They are not just threads on the app, they also take up valuable mental space and as a result, it is tougher to work with complete concentration.
Reading the firehose of team chat is, categorically, not work, but it certainly *feels* like it. “I’m in tune w/ the team!” Nope.
— Josh Pigford (@Shpigford) February 25, 2016
Integrations
Integrations are an effective feature to attract new teams to use these chat apps and get the chat admins hooked. Sure, it’s great to know who merged to the develop branch, or that a new user signed up to your service; but these are also sources of distraction. Say, you get a notification of a failed build from your CI/CD integration, it’s very tempting to find out why and how a commit by a fellow dev broke the build. We follow the links from the app and we end up involuntarily debugging the issue. And just like that, you’ve wasted ten minutes.
Meta-work
Stating the obvious here but, talking about work is not actually work. Some discussions over chat can take longer than expected and hampers the estimate of the task, because we don’t usually accommodate IM discussions while estimating time taken for a task to be completed. It’s better to have a real-time discussion in these cases.
Benefits
But it’s not all bad, there are some useful benefits to using IM at work, sometimes it’s even better than having a real-time face-to-face meeting or discussion.
Interruptions
No matter how good the documentation is, there is always some information that only the source code author knows. And when developers are interrupted to get this information, it affects their work flow. Joel here, talks about how productivity is adversely affected by interruptions from co-workers, especially when you’re in the zone. The zone is a mental state where developers are most productive and it takes some effort to get into that state. Interruptions easily knock a developer out of his zone and it takes about half-an-hour to get back to it. Asynchronous messages are a better solution in this case as there is no expectation of immediate responses.
History
In IM, it’s possible to refer to details from previous discussions as the chat history is saved. This isn’t possible in face-to-face discussions unless we take notes. Even then some details are missed and we may find the need to clarify them. Also, since the history is available, it’s better to check it when you feel like you’re repeating a question, because it doesn’t feel good when you’re asked to scroll up to read or when they quote a message they had sent previously.
Asynchronous
In general, it’s better to ask or observe teammates how they’d like to use work chat. Some prefer to clear notifications while others would prefer to check their messages in-between tasks. Asynchronous messaging, as mentioned above, allows some time to answer questions as we can choose when to reply. And since the history is saved, it is important to be very precise in communicating details so that it’s clear when we refer to the discussions on a later date. I find that taking those extra 30 seconds to verify technicality, either through a brief Google search or internalising a message before hitting ‘Send’, makes quite a difference.
IM is probably an aspect of work we hardly put much thought into. But it’s a tool we use everyday and on some days they might be the only tool we use to communicate with certain teammates. It’s good to take note of the benefits provided by the tool used so that we make full use of it and the limitations to prevent over-use.