It’s Time to Hop off the Chat Treadmill

How team chat slows us down by stealing our focus

Blue dot.
I’ll check that in a minute.
Scroll, scroll scroll.
Nothing new.
Back to work.
Blue dot.
Scroll, scroll, scroll.
Should I respond to that?
No, looks like they’ve moved on from that topic.
More scrolling.
Red dot.
“Yup, I’m on it.”
Blue dot.
“I thought we decided to do this a different way”
“Oh, guess I missed that in chat”
Red dot.
False alarm.
Blue dot.
Scroll, scroll scroll.

Unless you’re a part of a mythical “well disciplined” team, I suspect your chat feels a little like this. This is the chat treadmill. This is the consequence of an interface that doesn’t let you put it down. When you think you’re getting actual work done, you’re not really off the treadmill, you’re just on a cool-down. And as soon as you get that notification, it’s time to put those scrolling fingers to work. This needs to change. It’s time to hop off the chat treadmill altogether.

The Therac-25 wasn’t an inherently evil machine. If only the doctors knew how to use it correctly. So you disable notifications. But you’re just trading in multiple scroll-sprints for one long scroll-marathon. Or, you can just ignore unreads. If people need you, they’ll mention you by name. Right?

There have been other attempts to rein in the chat treadmill. Let’s step off on Fridays. Let’s use a private forum-like service. Let’s just go back to email with all its cruft and overhead.

My dearest Marjorie,

Today’s deployment has been weathering. A failed migration hath wrought havoc among the microservices. I feel we may never rid ourselves of the downtime that has plagued us time and again. I hope this email finds you well.

Cheers,
Jacob

None of these are complete solutions to the problem and all come with their own set of baggage. We’re stuck in a situation where we are more productive than we were before, but not as productive as we could be. We need to find a way to mix real-time communication and alerts with on-your-own-time conversations. Otherwise we’ll all just be running in place.

If you want to stay up-to-date with my attempt to solve this problem visit SlashAll.com and subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll be inviting early-access users soon.