Basecamp’s chat sucks, and I like it
heavymelon.blogI’ve given up trying to use chat as chat. It’s just another inbox now. All notifications disabled and instead its another “pull” mechanism. i’ll look in on Slack or whatever when i’m doing my rounds every couple of hours processing all my inboxes - pull requests, emails, blog notifications etc. Any chat threads get treated with the same GTD process - delete it, delegate it, do it or defer it.
I feel much more content controlling blocks of time to be productive instead of trying to run that chat treadmill.
I feel much more content controlling blocks of time to be productive instead of trying to run that chat treadmill
I too am guilty (conscientiously) of being a stochastic chat respondent, both with work chat and social chats.
Especially when cohorts begin a chat message with "Hey." followed by a pause and a wait for the message to be acknowledged in return, waiting for them typing out what it is they need me for and then typing back a response.
It kills momentum of work so much when people do this.
Much prefer "Hey. Need help with _______" just seems infinitely more efficient for both parties. Can quickly type back a solution, a delegation point ("I think _____ knows how that works") or a deferral ("Let me get back to you after ____") or file it in my mind while coming to a stopping point on whatever I'm working on if I need just a moment more to reach that point before pivoting over to a reply.
I always link them to nohello.com
The full post explains how to avoid being rude.
It's funny you link that because as soon as my fingers hit reply on my first comment, I began looking for blog posts to see if anyone had written about how frustratingly distracting the 'naked hello' (as I call it to my office mate) is.
Definitely putting this in my slack status right now. Thanks
It's almost too stereotypical for the chat examples on that page to look like IRC.
I usually point people at: https://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/02/20/naked-pings/
Written about IRC but applies to any chat type app, IMHO
From: Adam Jackson To: memo-list Subject: On “ping” etiquitte Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:21:30 -0500
IRC has developed a “ping” convention for getting someone’s attention. It works because most clients will highlight channels in which your name has been mentioned, so something like
ajax: ping
will make that channel show up pink instead of white for me [1].
I wish to correct, or at least amend, this behaviour. The naked ping should be Considered Harmful, for at least two reasons. The first is that it conveys no information. The recipient of your ping, like you, is a Busy Person. They may be in the middle of something requiring intricate thought, and should not be interrupted for anything less than fire, flood, or six figures of revenue. Worse, _you_ may forget why you pinged someone; when, four hours later, your victim gets back to IRC and responds to you, _you_ will be disrupted in turn trying to remember what was on your mind in the first place.
The second, more subtle reason proceeds from the first. A ping with no data is essentially a command. It’s passive-aggressive; it implies that the recipient’s time is less valuable than yours. [2] The pingee will respond in one (or both) of two ways. Either they will experience increased stress due to increased unpredictable demands on their time, or they will simply ignore naked pings.
The fundamental issue here is a misunderstanding of the medium. IRC is not a telephone. It’s volatile storage. The whole reason the ping works is because the client remembers seeing the ping, and can save it in your history buffer so you can see who was talking to you and why.
The naked ping removes this context.
Please. Save your time. Save my time. Make all of our lives more efficient and less stressful. Ping with data. At a minimum:
ajax: ping re bz 534027
See the difference? Now you’ve turned slow, lockstep, PIO-like interaction into smooth pipelineable DMA. It’s good for your hardware, and it’s good for you.
[1] – irssi 4 life.
[2] – Their time may well be less valuable than yours. That’s not the point.
> Not responding immediately or within a day could label you rude or non-collaborative. Even if you didn’t want others to feel like that, the receiving end of a chat message couldn’t help it. They felt they needed to respond immediately.
It really depends on the expectations of the team and the culture of the company. I suspect this is the same attitude that would manifest itself in the office as people randomly walking up and asking a question, thus disrupting the thought process. Some companies fare better than others in respecting people's time and concentration.
The author is organizing everything in Basecamp projects, and I'm glad that works for them. Basecamp is a great tool. But a similar process is possible with chat. We use Webex Teams (eating our own dogfood, by way of disclaimer) and organize ourselves in teams (pun intended) where there are many rooms for various topics. The general expectation is that participation is async unless you're @-mentioned. If one requests some task to be done and it's not some quick thing, the answer is usually "create a Jira ticket for me".
One of the limitation of chat systems such as Teams and Slack is when people try to use them to keep track of work items. That creates stress. But for ongoing topics that one can join or leave at will, it's rather useful. And if the discussion becomes something that needs to be sychronous, being able to instantly start a video call, hash it out then go back to other work is way better than back-and-forth in text, be it in a chat room or project management system.
The other point that the article touches on which is super important is leadership happens is actively involved remotely. That prevents relegating remote workers to second class status.
So it's not just chat, but how Basecamp combines chat with a message board, allowing for a less pressing non-async alternative for certain types of communication. The secondary effect is the async chat kinda sucks which pushes people towards using the message board when they otherwise wouldn't?
This is interesting. Often constraints make for a good experience. But in terms of solutions to apply more general to other companies it's difficult to nail down here (besides of course adopting Basecamp).
As the author mentioned they tried having a sync backbone with Github Issues but eventually everyone just started using Slack for everything. I'm curious if a Slack company did a better job of directly integrating a sync message board feature if it would be used. Or would it require totally rethinking the product + a workplace culture/methodology.
The fact that chat sucks in Basecamp has some downsides of course. I often want to drop a code snippet and ask something. That’s difficult.
For a small team, we really don't have any downside really except this one. All pings and project campfires are riddled with screenshots of small snippets of code. I've tried moving my team to Mattermost or Slack, but chatting on Basecamp is a hard habit to lose. If there's a better way to do this in Basecamp I'd like to know.