The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

Nev­er emp­ty in the same way

Some­one who is used to emails might have the ambi­tion to emp­ty the inbox com­plete­ly once in a while and will be well aware of how sur­pris­ing­ly good it feels when you have processed every sin­gle email it con­tained. Accom­plish­ing this is depen­dent on you mak­ing a deci­sion and tak­ing action on basi­cal­ly every email you receive (even though tak­ing action might just be delet­ing the email). How are we sup­posed to do the same thing in Slack and Teams?

The beau­ty of this divi­sion of infor­ma­tion is that we do not have to do many of the things the email clients require us to do.

• You prob­a­bly save processed emails in a fold­er struc­ture for future ref­er­ence. There is no need for this extra step in a chat since every­thing is already there. If it has passed by you, it will be there in the stream of mes­sages, some­where down­stream. You do not have to do any­thing to save it, the infor­ma­tion is not going any­where. This would, of course, be the case if you just left every email where it was after you received it too, but you would nev­er get the feel­ing of being caught up or hav­ing an inbox with­out unread messages.
• You have to process all your emails to attain that emp­ty inbox. In a chat ser­vice, there are only some mes­sages you need to keep an eye on and process in a sim­i­lar man­ner:
  
  - Those which are DM (direct mes­sages) and addressed specif­i­cal­ly to you (from one per­son to anoth­er).
  
  - Those that men­tion you, using an “@davidstiernholm” or the likes.
  
  - Those that con­tain the key­words you have asked the ser­vice to noti­fy you of when they appear in a message.

The first two kinds of mes­sages men­tioned above require action since some­one is wait­ing for your response, so you can not let it go until you have answered them. But the third kind does not need your imme­di­ate action since it is a mes­sage con­tain­ing a spe­cif­ic word you have set a noti­fi­ca­tion for. 

All oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion can be left for lat­er — it is as if you step out of the stream and onto the shore — since you can read it when­ev­er you want to lat­er on and it will still be there when you get back to it.

Do this

If you have found it hard to know how to deal with the new chat based col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­form you have been asked to use, then make it clear to your­self right now what a rea­son­able lev­el of ambi­tion would be, at least when it comes to two things:

1. What kind of mes­sages do you always want to process and answer, and which can be left for lat­er or do not ever have to be read at all?
2. How long can you post­pone your response at most? Mean­ing, how often will you check if you have new mes­sages to see to (which is rel­e­vant when you do not work with the chan­nel open all the time — an aspect I will return to in anoth­er Done!)? For how long will you be com­fort­able being ​“away” from the plat­form at a time?

Stay clear

If you make it clear to your­self what you expect (of your­self) when it comes to your activ­i­ty and pres­ence in the chat based col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­form, you will feel less stressed by it when you are not ​“there”. You will feel more free since you know what you need to keep track of and what you can ignore. You are in charge of the chan­nel instead of the oth­er way around, and you can use it in a way that tru­ly ben­e­fits both you and your com­pa­ny or team.

What’s your way?

What have you decid­ed to do when it comes to how you use Slack, Teams and sim­i­lar ser­vices? A pen­ny for your thoughts…

(By the way, do you know that you can be noti­fied when some­one uses a cer­tain word in a chat mes­sage?)