
Ask HN: Do you use communication tools differently now? - bsg75
I have noted a change in communication techniques in my company, and am wondering if its a widespread change.<p>With the shift from phones to email to IM, there seemed to be an advantage where messages could be posted to a person or group, and in async fashion a reply received in short order. A sender did not have to find an open slot in the receiver&#x27;s schedule for a meeting or call. A simple queue was established that made scheduling less important.<p>Now I&#x27;m finding more success in &quot;bugging&quot; people I need information from, because email and IM are being increasingly ignored for hours or days in attempt to manage workflows. People schedule time to review messages, at times once a day or a few times a week and in the end make the communication bottlenecks worse than in the pre-IM days. In some cases a carefully crafted email with an ask does not find the 1 minute window needed to answer (which in turn creates a permanent, searchable reference), and we wind up having meetings.<p>&quot;This meeting could have been an email&quot; is painfullt ironic in this scenario.
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mtmail
I used IM at work for 10 years in small and enterprise companies where
everybody had an account. Of course you still had your personal contact list,
users had to invite/verify you as contact so usually you wouldn't just
(online) chat-up the CEO. You saw who's online, who had a kind-of
vacation/away status and it removed a lot of phone calls or even walks to
another building. It was used together with email and worked great.

Now with Slack and its public groups (channels) everybody can post to 10s or
100s of user. Even in small companies friends report you cannot reach "inbox
zero" because there's always some message asking for attention. Many users
over-communicate, too few users understand the threading feature (I'm one of
them). You can put somebody on the spot by marking them in a group message.
Overall it starts to feel overwhelming and less productive.

On top now we started putting devops/cron messages into Slack which often need
immediate attention.

