🔴 DO. NOT. DISTURB.

Remote work communication & Why technology has not caught up just yet

Disclaimer: This post is the absolute truth and totally not a biased opinion based on my personal experience.

I bet you are familiar with the “DO NOT DISTURB” status on team communication platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Team, unless you’re using Zalo which I have no experience with. Obviously, that means “Stay away, I am busy”. So, do you just ignore it and message them anyway? If not then when can you message them? Do you have to periodically check every five minutes? What if it’s important or urgent?

What if there’s a deeper reason? What if people set the “DO NOT DISTURB” status because they can’t go by 5 minutes without receiving 20 message notifications and it’s driving them crazy?

Is it just me or remote work communication is oftentimes cumbersome? Should I set a busy status and risk being cut off from important or urgent messages, or should I leave it as available and risk my productivity being hindered by the noise?

On the contrary, no one needs to put a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign on their desk while working in the office because others can simply tell just by taking a glance at their facial expression and body language. Wearing headphones means “I am focusing on my work so do not disturb me unless it’s urgent”. Having a cranky face means “Do not disturb me with small talk, I am not in the mood”. Being in a meeting room means.. well.. “Do not disturb me at all, I am in a meeting”. There are surprisingly many levels of “DO NOT DISTURB” that we can just tell in person with subtle hints. Disappointingly, these hints doesn’t translate well to statuses on Slack, not to mention that they are often misused for “Stop bothering me with notifications”.

One can argue that there is a custom status feature. Well, you’re missing the point. But let’s pretend that it is the point, it would take discipline to update their status, in details, every time they change their working state, which is also a non-value added activity, just like this paragraph.

Back to the point, this is not about apps statuses. I was just luring you in. This is about a bigger and more abstract topic: The cost of communication.

Communication is costly at the wrong time

Getting the attention of someone “in the zone” to ask “what’s for lunch” costs them their time building up to that perfect state of focus. Breaking into a meeting in progress to ask “what’s for lunch” costs the attendees’ time asking “where were we?” afterwards to get back to the topic being discussed (let’s pretend it’s normal to break into an ongoing meeting). But it feels completely normal to type “@here” on #general to ask every single person in the company “what’s for lunch” despite whatever they are doing, right? Yeah, I exaggerated and hopefully no one does that, but even announcing “@here” on any channel may disrupt someone and cost them their focus.

Being physically in the office lets us know the cost of initiating a conversation, and we can choose the right time to minimize the impact. Instead of disrupting someone in the middle of their work, why not wait until they stand up for a coffee break and engage them in a conversation? It costs nothing.

The problem with remote communication is we do not know the cost. Statuses represent only a handful of indicators on the “cost meter”, much like a temperature meter that can only tell “hot” or “cold” instead of actual degree. We also have to manually change status to show the “cost”. What about queuing? Have you ever gotten dozens of messages simultaneously from 5 people right after updating your status to “Available” and immediately regret your decision? Think about the non-remote counterpart of this situation, only 1 person will be talking to you while the other 4 would see that you’re occupied and wait for their turn. Not so overwhelming now huh.

Team communication apps could address these problems to an extent. Look at Discord, it shows which game you are playing. So why not show “Excel is being used” automatically? Take it to another level by adding elapsed time as well. We can then say “Jack has been on Excel for 40 minutes, better not disturb him” or “Sue has been using Photoshop for only 2 minutes, I can drop her a quick question without disturbing her too much”. Maybe show a user as “Active/Available” only when the app window is actually active, meaning it is not being minimized or running in the background. Might as well address the queuing problem by simply showing the number of unread messages to others. “Wow, Tom has 15 unread messages, better not add to his plate right now”. It is still not the same as communicating in person, but it is a step in the right direction to better the timing of initiating a conversation, for those who are mindful of others.

Communication is costly with the wrong body parts

‘Tis a productive day at the office and you’re really getting into it. You have finished nearly a whole day of work in just an hour and there’s no sign of slowing down. Suddenly your colleague sitting next to you asks “Hey have you finished the quarterly report?”. Your brain hangs for a fraction of a second and, without even looking, you answer “Yeah, I’ll send you in a moment”. You eyes and fingers are still focusing on the task at hand. You did not lose much momentum, if at all.

In an alternate universe, probably Earth-199999, the same scenario unfolds but with a twist, you’re working remotely. You hear that annoying notification sound and you switch tab to read the message, you spend a few seconds to type out the answer, then you switch back and the momentum is gone. You have to build it all over again. That’s not even considering there are probably 10 other messages waiting, and now that you know they exist, you cannot fight the urge to read them.

Business communication apps rely heavily on the eyes and fingers, which are already occupied with actual work, while the ears and mouth are unemployed. It is like waiting for the cargo lift to finish transporting the piano so you can go up, while the idling passenger lift is also perfectly fine to use. Hence, business communication apps should seek to minimize the use of visual input whenever possible. Take inspiration from Google Maps, it announces the direction instructions so the users’ eyes can just focus on the road. Messages like “Friendly reminder, there’s a meeting in 5 minutes” don’t need to be read by the eyes. There should be a feature to read out loud these kind of messages automatically when they are received, or maybe voice messages, or a walkie-talkie feature.

I know apps like gather.town exists, and you may even suggest everyone to just join a voice chat room but I don’t think they fit the use cases. These kind of conversations are super quick, with little to no engagement required. Real life interactions of this kind often happen in less than 5 seconds. Hence, any digital solution that doesn’t meet this metric is deemed not good enough by me. Do I even need to mention that these apps eat RAM like zombies eat brains? And another app to run on top of an already enormous collection of other WFH apps? Yeah-nah.

Communication is costly with the wrong means

We use bike to get around town, car to go from city to city and plane to travel between countries. So why on earth do some people use Slack for everything? Communication can take on many forms, such as talking, message, phone call, email, letter, announcement, you name it. Factors such as intention, urgency, importance and engagement, determine the suitable mean of communication. Need to deliver an important and urgent message? Make a phone call. A formal request in a professional setting? Send an email. Something heartfelt? Write a letter. Yes, other means of communication may do the job, but it also may not be as efficient, and may even send the wrong kind of message, or bite you in the ass later. Imagine brainstorming with someone via chatting back and forth for hours. It is weird to say it but “that could have been a meeting”.

More often than not, people use team communication platforms for the wrong purpose. Why sending an urgent message and then make a phone call to the receiver to ask them to “check Slack”? Wouldn’t making a phone call in the first place more efficient if it’s so urgent? Why making an important announcement to all employees on Slack when email exists? Would someone have to scroll all the way up or remember the keyword to find it when referring back to it? What if it is a free version of Slack and messages begin to disappear? In my opinion, anything you wouldn’t communicate verbally in an open office space should also not be communicated on Slack. In other words, the attributes of communication between talking in the middle of the office and chatting on Slack should be the same: quick, relax, non urgent, moderately engaged, not so important and not archivable.

There’s no denying that this falls in the category of human error, or a “bad habit” that people should get rid off and not the technology’s fault. However, team communication platforms could still take the steps to discourage, help and let user be more mindful. For example, the app can suggest sending an email instead when the user types a message longer than 500 words; or it can detect and generate meeting minutes for a long session of messaging back and forth with many technical keywords (with a sarcastic comment “that could have been a meeting”). These simple features would let the user think twice about whether they are using the correct means of communication for the intended purpose.

Final thoughts

It seems like remote work is here to stay and the number of companies adopting it is growing. Team communication apps are becoming a crucial part of every business but sometimes they inadvertently distract and make work so stressful that you could not focus on the “deep work”. This might even be a part of a bigger problem called “context switching kills productivity”, but that’s for another day, or maybe never. Back to the point, team communication apps can, and should, take measures to preserve productivity instead of sacrificing it. Start with the suggestions above, and throw in some advance features like tracking the time spent on messaging per week, so that an engineer can know they are doing something wrong when they spend 4 hours each week replying messages instead of doing technical work, or tracking the number of messages that you send per week and compare it to an average to see if you are being a disturbance in the company. Until then, I will keep my “DO NOT DISTURB” status on to have a peaceful remote work day.