The situation
It’s the beginning of April 2020 and “COVID-19” happened. Nearly the whole world is in lock-down mode currently. Some more, some less. And most people are very worried.
I’m stupidly lucky to work at a company that reacted quite early and strict and went into full mandatory “work from home”-mode. And since it’s a very modern IT company, all of the work luckily can be done remotely. Because the internet exists and our whole infrastructure (at least the parts i know of) is available from every place in the world (with proper VPN of course).
Quite recently i got promoted to a team-lead position, which doesn’t mean “management” in our company, just that you’re the person that should take care about various organizational and operational topics. That means for example planning sprints and that I’m the main contact point for people outside of our team that need something from us.
Instant messaging is a problem, not a solution (at least at work)
So now I’m sitting at my cozy office at home and first was naively thinking “Well, at least I’ll get some actual development work done now. Because there will be less interruptions” ….Holy shit did i underestimate the interruptive power of instant messaging. In our case: Slack. And also Zoom meetings. Holy crap.
I’m about 3 weeks into government prescribed self-isolation and it feels like all i do during my working hours is constantly chatting and video-conferencing. Don’t get me wrong, those two can be quite valuable tools to keep up the social contact with my colleagues. But in my opinion, chatting is terrible for handling our “daily business”. You are confronted with a constant stream of tiny chunks of information. And not only from one source (person), but from multiple. At the same time. Usually about different topics. That’s like trying to watch 15 movies at the same time. Afterwards you’ve watched 15 movies, but you can’t barely remember any details. Of course this is a bit different with chatting. You might have the chance to stick with one conversation at a time, at least for a short time frame. But you’ll still jump around between conversations constantly. And it’s all for the greater good! You want to be a helpful colleague, you want to be responsive, you want to react quickly to whatever comes along…etc. And in the end, after your day of “work” is over, it will feel like you accomplished nothing. Sure, you answered lots of questions, helped others getting over some obstacle in their task, where a nice and overly helpful co-worker. But damn, I’m (more or less) a developer. I want to build something. Automate some annoying task, produce a piece of software for our customers, patch a bug….etc. But it’s impossible, because there’s always this nagging feeling that I’ve to answer somebody on Slack. Because that’s the expectation that comes with tools like that: instant feedback. But this is not how software development work. We deal with complex problems on complex systems and need to prioritize which of those problems we deal with in what order. That can’t be done with this kind of fragmented communication. It’s like I’m a server which gets bombarded with a constant flood of UDP packets on all ports. I need a firewall, a packet filter, a way to keep my communication-ports free and available. And also a way to reduce my own system-load to have resources free to get some actual work done.
E-Mail to the rescue?
This got me thinking. A lot. Back when i started working in IT,there was no instant messaging for “the masses” at work Sure, there was IRC, but it was only used by us nerds/geeks to keep in touch. And maybe sometimes to ask a quick technical question. But then you mostly got a pointer where to look for a solution to your problem (quite often the infamous RTFM). From what i experienced, most of the more serious technical discussions in the internet happened in mailing lists and the Usenet.
Maybe because an asynchronous medium is the better tool for the job? It’s just the modern version of writing a letter. When you write a letter, you (hopefully!) take your time to phrase the words for your objective properly. Because you want to make sure to get the whole idea to the other side of communication without going back and forth needlessly. You could say the limitations can be the main advantage here.
With instant messaging the conversation very often starts with a simple “hello”. Then nothing happens until you finally answer to find out what the person on the other side actually wants. This at least problematic enough that there is now a website which advocates against this exact behavior: nohello.com. I can only emphasize that even this small behavioral phenomenon can be quite a recurring problem during a typical day. And this is only the start of one single communication stream. Then you have to, quite often, pull it out of peoples noses what they actually want or need. Because they haven’t yet sat back for 5 minutes to think about it. They started a chat.
I do believe that this won’t happen as much with an asynchronous medium like e-mail. Nobody sends a mail with just “hello” in it (at least not in a professional environment). People tend to at least shortly think about what they want to tell or ask you. So this is the first part that’s better.
The second and at least evenly important part is: You can sift through your inbox in a way more structured manner. At the worst you do something like “from top to bottom” or “start with the oldest and work your way to the most recent”. But with every not completely crappy mail client you can apply some basic filtering. And the less crappy ones also have proper displaying of mail threads (no, the “threads” in Slack are not good enough), which helps understanding the flow of information quite a bit.
You ranted a lot, but what now?
I’ll try to move my communication more back to e-mails. That will definitely take some time since i got very used to Slack at this point of time. Ironically i was even annoyed by mails lately. Because it felt like it costs so much more time compared to just chatting. But as i rambled intensively above, the quality of information transported is potentially better with e-mails (at least that’s what i currently believe).
This will probably also take some understanding from my colleagues, since most things are communicated via Slack currently. I’m looking forward to some lengthy discussions here ;-)
I guess this will be some kind of experiment of going “back to the roots”. Maybe I’ll be posting some update to that later one. Assuming my co-workers haven’t chased my away with pitchforks and torches.