Say more than Hi

In 2020, remote work took over the software industry. After year long experiment, lot of companies decided to embrace remote work, and hybrid.

Even with a more than a year remote work, people still miss a key thing about asynchronous work. And a key part of this how you start a conversation with your co-worker.

People are no longer working during the same hours. Everybody try to make the best out of remote work and except few overlapping hours, people get things done at their own leisure.

This is a common pattern I’ve seen while communicating via Slack/MS Teams.

Jim: Hi

// after 2 hours
Dwight: Hello

// after 30 minutes
Jim: I wanted to know about so-and-so...

// after 10 minutes
Dwight: This is how you do so-and-so...

If you look at the above conversation, to get to the point more than 2 hours is wasted. I’m not saying every conversation is like this, but some of them are.

What’s missing here?

• When the communication is started, there’s no context.
• A good amount of time is wasted without getting to the point
• If Jim had communicated what they wanted to know in the first message, Dwight could’ve had some time to think about it and reply.

How can this be better?

Jim: Hi, I wanted to know about so-and-so...

// after 2 hours
Dwight: This is how you do so-and-so...

Before I talked about having no context for these type of communication, and that could be problematic. When Jim pings Hi to Dwight, a lot of things could run in Dwight’s mind.

Dwight have no clue why Jim is messaging, and Dwight can think all sorts of things.

• Why is Jim messaging me, he hasn’t messaged me in a long time?
• is it about the last thing he requested, I had told him I’ll give this next Friday?
• or did I/he mess up something?

Your brain is wicked thing, it starts running wild at times. Let’s not do that. Let’s be more wise and embrace asynchronous work.