You communicate with others in a semi-asynchronous way, through messaging applications.
People tend to wait for responses before stating what they want, causing unneeded distractions.
What is this? These describe factors at play that influence the outcome of the practice. They are not necessarily good or bad, but they are important to be aware of. Some contextual forces are enablers, giving the practice a higher chance of being useful. Others are deterrents, making the practice less useful in your given context.
The following factors prevent effective application of the practice:
Write your messages with enough context for the recipient to prioritize them, keeping in mind they will be read and acted upon when it best suits your conversational partner.
Our two protagonists, Alex and Bernie, work on the same project.
They live in different timezones, as do most of the members of their team.
One day, an issue pops up on their development server causing the entire team to lose the ability to test their system fully.
Alex, being the newest member of the team, has managed to identify the root cause of the issue and is trying to solve the issue.
They get stuck during the process, and want to ask Bernie for help, as Bernie has been on the team the longest.
Bernie is working on a critical piece of code that was promised to be ready by the following week. This is highly important to the project, as the client is waiting for a new feature to solve a business inefficiency. Due to its importance, the client has demanded the development team put their best people on it.
Alex, being used to face-to-face conversations and online chats with their friends, says hello to Bernie. As Bernie is busy working on an important task, it takes some time for them to see the message. Distracted by the message, Bernie drops what they are doing and responds. You can see their conversation in the image below:
This time, Alex remembered to immediately state why he is contacting Bernie. Alex writes a short message explaining what is going on, and why they need Bernie’s help.
As Bernie is busy working on an important task, it takes some time for them to see the message. Bernie decides the team being blocked from doing their tests will impact their team’s delivery, but knows that they have already written down how to fix similar issues. In response to Alex’s message, Bernie advices them to first try a quick reset of the system, and to restart the server if that doesn’t work.
In this version of the conversation, both Alex and Bernie are interrupted less often. The conversation itself take less time to complete, and both of them can continue their work more rapidly.
You can see the revised conversation in the image below: