No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office.

By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating yourself even more. While it can be distracting to jump on a call while you actually meant to focus on some coding, it can also be great to have a quick chat and brainstorm about an idea rather than let the other person work out the solution in isolation only for me to then suggest a totally different approach in the PR review (yay! asynchronous!).

This may sound reasonable, but the world is not black and white. If we turn every quick question into a complete meeting with agenda and whatnot, the organisation will become extremly bureaucratic. And at some point people will start making guesses instead of reaching out to experts because it is just too much work.

So in my opinion, the author is a little bit selfish too. The company cannot 100% align with what best works for you.

There are valid arguments here so I broadly agree with where the author is getting at.

But some points are a stretch and that weakens the whole argument.

Point 3.1 : you waste HOURS of time debugging the wrong piece of code -- going off on a quest based on just one single chat message with incomplete info (and not even a stack trace as you deem it so essential yourself)? You don't ask any clarifying questions to validate your assumptions before sinking hours into work? Is that not your fault instead?

Point 4: so you want a whole IT support ticket (with attachments and priority classification if IM allows it) in a single chat message?

Why are you accepting support requests on chat instead of via a ticketing tool that keeps track of request volumes, history, SLAs etc.

If your workplace doesn't care about this level of productivity management and efficiency anyway -- why bother with these rules of engagement.

Also when someone pings you about an issue ... there is a chance you already know about an outage/issue and are working on it...and might just say "I know, fix is on the way by EoD, sit tight." If so... the whole stack trace and explanation of the problem scenario, what they have tried etc is all useless waste. They are just trying to optimize THEIR productivity by pinging you first instead. Two people can play this game.

At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for productivity, when the sacrifice (being pleasant & accessible to coworkers) isn't worth the gain (more focus time coding).

For larger enterprises with complex org charts, I consider an agenda one of two invaluable tools for meetings, the other being post-meeting minutes including a RACI chart.

If someone can't think up a few bullet points for a meeting in advance, that person has not prepared for their meeting, and will waste some of the participant's time.

Not creating (one-line) minutes that most importantly include decisions that have been made in the meeting is also the perfect set-up for wasting other people's time.

I see this similar to the effort of writing a good commit message.

> So we both embark on a completely needless adventure of changing random parts of the code and scratching our heads as to why nothing makes the error go away. I end up wasting hours because of a typo.

Wow. That's just straight up admitting being an idiot and blaming others for it. If a person leaving out a stack trace causes you to ask for a stack trace that is on them. They wasted some of your time. (Or at least I guess you can argue that.) If a person leaving out a stack trace causes you to blindly modify random parts of the code then that is on you and you only.

Confused people ask confused questions. Because they are confused. If they could ask the right questions they would have already helped themselves. It is your job to not let their confusion overtake you. Ask questions until you understand the situation. Software engineering is not a SWAT raid. You can and should ask questions and shoot only later.

I sympathise with some of this, but the tone is unbearable.

>Don't worry, I'm not mad at you. Those are common mistakes that people make

Calling a common and natural communication style that is not your preferred communication style objectively a "mistake". Charming.

>Maybe you work in an environment where productivity is low, so everyone has time to jump on a quick call or chat with you any time you ask.

"But I don't, because I'm amazing. You've probably heard of me."

> A call is more distracting than a chat message.

I highly disagree. A call has a definite start and end. Async chats leave an open thread in your mind that needs to be constantly polled and interrupt flow much more than a call.

I’m amazed these titans of productivity have time to write blog posts about productivity.

I will never understand people who write "Hello" or "Hi Joe" in Slack and then just wait. It has to be some form of mental illness.

Open a jira ticket for every meeting you attend. (And close it). When asked about productivity treat meetings as the most productive use of your time. "I had a fantastic day yesterday, attended 5 meetings and closed 5+n tickets. I'm so productive I deserve a raise."

Managers treat meetings as the most important thing you do. (Its the most important thing they do.) The disconnect is that we don't see them the same.

Once you start taking credit for all the meetings you attend, you'd be surprised how many fewer you get invited to.

I agree with this entirely, and have griped about it to people (and here) before.

But I would never, under any but the most egregious circumstances, complain directly to a colleague who does it or (especially) send them this link.

People are different, and most people are different to me. I'm getting paid partly to deal with other people, so that's what I'll (sometimes grudgingly) do. If they're doing this all the time to each-other, my productivity is still going to be relatively high anyway.

I'm a huge advocate of full-time remote working, but those like me who feel it is the future of work need to stop being so dogmatic about how communication should happen.

I don't really like posts like this. Sure, it's a great idea in a remote context to write down how you like to communicate, and how you like to be communicated with at work. (You should do it, it's great!)

However, not everybody will agree with you and part of being a good employee on a large, distributed, team is understanding and working with other people's communication styles.

Even if you hate it.

There is definitely culture clash in this. I think it is probably better to normalize "available" and "unavailable" spans for the knowledge workers who need flow to work effectively. (And I am one.) If my plan was to write a prototype or debug a difficult problem, it doesn't matter if I'm expected to respond to "Hello" or "Hello, <30 word question>", I lose my flow and the job will be delayed. I might even end up permanently distracted on something else. Better would be to connect a pomodoro timer to status that says "Available at <+30m>" when the timer starts. Then I could respond to "hello" and take a quick call and ask the meeting planner to make an agenda.

I get the sentiment, but also, for many the work place is a socialization hub.

And what OP argue about is a direct consequence of that: small talks, serendipity, politness rules, etc.

If you want raw efficiency, the article makes sense.

However, in most orgs, that's not what most workers want.

> Those are common mistakes that people make when working remotely. Maybe you work in an environment where productivity is low, so everyone has time to jump on a quick call or chat with you any time you ask.

Classic 'you are with us or against us' level of argumentation. Saying hello is already a _mistake_, and paraphrasing: you either like to work for a company of underperforming losers, or you need to follow the advice of the article. How convincing!

The way to stop these distractions is not to set a bunch of rules, but to document things in clear and discoverable ways that people can search to find what they need. No one wants to interrupt; people do that because it's the quickest and easiest way to find an answer. If you make something else the quickest way they'll use that instead.

these things annoy me too but it's never going to stop, linking somebody to something like this is just going to result in everybody disliking you and then asking you for a quick call anyway when they want something.

This particular blog post is probably too snarky to share with most people, but I've had success with gently explaining the same concept to various clients and coworkers, especially ones who are working different with different schedules or time zones.

The trick is to frame their behavior as inconvieniencing them rather than you. In other words, if they send you all the details up front, then you can send them a good answer as soon as possible rather than needing them to drop what they're doing later on to send you a follow-up reply when you ask for clarification.

I've also found that, for people who seem to prefer talking to typing, asking them to record a short Loom video of the issue usually gets them to explain the problem with enough details to solve it.

Most of the time, im letting YOU know that the product or service YOU own is not working. Its a courtesy. If I have to jump through this many hoops to tell you that, ill just let it continue to fail until someone more important than me has a problem. Then ill point them to you.

I don't really agree about that "frobnicate" deal. If you messed up when you added a parameter to "frobnicate", you'll get "Hi, you broke frobnicate, please fix it. It's causing issues.".

You break it, you fix it, including the troubleshooting.

This guy is too concerned about himself rather than others. Working at a company means you're a resource anyone can use, live with it and don't make up your rules on how to communicate. Just do it and collect.

While I totally agree with the post, I think the tone of the delivery is likely to undermine the points made. From my perspective, for these guidelines to be adhered to there needs to be a broader buy in. 37signals are perhaps a prominent example of how this works. And if it's presented in a more pleasant way, rather than in the tone of a parent chastising a child, I think these principles can take root and become part of team/company culture.

In my last role I was CTO of a ~650 person multinational. I agree with almost everything in this piece, perhaps even absolutely everything (although I admit to skim reading it quite quickly so I may have missed something).

A lot of this is summed up for me by a piece of advice to managers that I read several years ago, almost certainly in an article linked from this site: "don't be spooky".

I.e., be clear about what you want. Don't leave people in the dark. Particularly as a manager, if you send a vague request for a quick chat with someone, they're quite likely to think it's something bad or they're in trouble, and become anxious, particularly if they don't know you well. So not only are you breaking their flow state, but you're freaking them out as well.

Specificity, along with an appropriate level of detail are profoundly reassuring from a variety of perspectives: including reassuring people that you're not simply about to waste their time.

What I've found best is a compromise: send a chat message like "Hi foo, I hope you're having a good day! I'm trying to figure something out with Postgres and I wonder if you might have 30 minutes to chat about it?". As a remote worker, there is also a social cohesion upside to having a synchronous call sometimes.

The only real point is the 3rd.

I agree the 'Hi' type are annoying, but I for sure don't expect a stack trace.

Worst case the person is from another team, and I would rather have context on why they're contacting me directly on IM. Best case is that's a coworker, and I trust that if my coworkers ask me in particular and not my team's chat, its a specific issue I will have an easier time dealing with (or I made myself available for help because I'm on toilet duty and will jump for anything remotely interesting).

If I am engaged with you and you ask me for a quick call, I either have 30 minutes ahead and agree, or I don't, and refuse. I fully expect the call to last anywhere between 2 and 30 minutes (unless you're a PO and I set aside 2 hours). The more we understand each other, the quicker the calls will be anyway, so even if the call isn't 'productive', it ultimately is.

Social behaviors are complicated. Yes of course, it's possible to have both pleasantries (hi, how are you, etc) and ask the question in very polite ways (whenever you're free, if I'm not disturbing you, I wanted to check with you about <xyz>).

But social behaviors are habitual. I spent time in many parts of Africa where it's just downright rude/unacceptable to go to someone and ask something, even if it's just a change for a few bucks. You have to go through the pleasantries and WAIT for them to acknowledge before you ask what you want.

It's impossible to change that habit, no matter the tool, medium, rationale, process, even urgency. They're still going to say "can I talk to you for a sec" and wait for an answer. I've had people do this in the middle of production issues and it's driven me crazy. Even when things are burning, their way of escalating is still only to say "I NEED to talk to you right now", they're simply not tuned to state what they want.

To not help with this, I also went through trainings on personality traits and communication styles. Some people reveal and then explain (direct communication style), and some people first explain then reveal (indirect style), they need you to go through the thought process first before concluding. I learned that it's guaranteed to create conflicts when the communication style for a person is reversed. If you give a conclusion-first to someone who needs explanation-first, they're tuned to mentally reject the conclusion – no matter how you sugar coat it or your intention or rationale.

So we have to constantly keep reinforcing what we're ok with. Just keep calm and reinforce, tell people to provide context in your chat profile, use an auto reply, copy paste a message saying "next time please feel free to ask the question..." and so on. It's kind of a never ending battle. The only thing is, please don't assume anyone is being a jerk, the same way you are not being a jerk by ignoring that message or replying tersely.

As a junior i often wrote "Hi, do you have a moment? (ok if not)" in slack (or lync at the time) to senior people when I had questions. I then didn't expect a reply unless the senior person was not busy or bored. If no reply within 5 mins I would ask the next person.

I did this when I had a question that perhaps 20 people who I knew could answer, though I had no way of telling who (if anyone) was free to chat something over with me. I didn't send a group email as the projects that I was working on contained need to know stuff, so sending details of it to 20 people would be a no-go but saying I spoke about this with Bob, here is the audit trail would be fine.

I still think that this was optimal in that situation, though I often see it derided with no better option suggested.

More often than not when I encounter people with these very strict prescribed communication preferences it’s due to either, hubris, inability to manage their own time or skills issue - people are just afraid to be asked a question because they might not know the answer.

The worst is when someone “wants to have a quick call this afternoon” but refuses to use calendar scheduling tools. You then have to engage in “the waiting game” where you don’t want to start anything deep for fear of getting interrupted.

Largely these problems exist because people type poorly. It is much easier for them to speak than it is for them to type.

I require all staff to learn to touch type if they don’t know how, and prefer candidates with high typing test speeds.

Or you could be a bit more approachable and people wouldn't feel the need to ask permission before stating the problem. And a quick, "yo what's up" is easy enough..

The truth, once again, is in the middle i suppose.

No hello is very reasonable, but only to a point. It's a specific adaptation to asynchronous communication that kicked off in the IRC days where channel idling was common - async is a radically different form of comms to in-person & this etiquette aids in adapting to those differences.

But it's important to remember that it is an adaptation for a specific comms medium & applying it too broadly may really just be a way of shirking socialisation. That's fine if you're most productive as an engineer working alone on your fully-self-contained owned project, but in most cases collaboration is beneficial. Collaboration introduces communication inefficiencies but its a known trade-off.

Especially extending this barrier-to-entry to other things like calls (verbal comms) & meetings (in-person) can lead to significant inaccessibility, exclusion & siloing. It's worth stepping back & looking at problems you may be trying to solve here: e.g. too-many-meetings or long meeting run-on. These are problems that frankly this doesn't do anything to solve whatsoever; you'll just end up with managers setting boilerplate agendas for the same "too many long meetings" & meanwhile some of the peers you may need to have a valuable short meet with will be too hung up by your requirements to contact you at all.

PG put this perhaps more gently in his essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule.

I work with people whose days are a sequence of meetings and chats within meetings. They don't understand (or respect) that I have meetings but also must concentrate for periods of time.

https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Quick calls are super important. Sometimes they'll settle a matter immediately, in a few minutes, instead of dragging the decision to a 15 minutes time slot the next week.

One of my first bosses would constantly push me to make phone calls instead of firing emails, and even though I didn't enjoy it, it undeniably worked. Things got done much faster, with far less effort from everyone.

This just feels like the classic “maker vs manager schedule”, except viewed from only one side.

Most larger orgs run on a mixture of those depending on role and where they interact you get friction

If you force the one on the other in either direction that person gets nothing done. Which is functionally what this article attempts - solves writers problem (“do it my way”) but ignores the consequences for others.

No, chat is not asynchronous. It's a dialoge, it is synchronous. If you want people to write "Hello, my problem is xxx" just close your chat box and ask for emails.

Moreover there are studies showing that if people socialize and get to know each other a bit before working together, there are more chances to collaborate and to reduce conflicts.

I endorse the general thrust of this post, however:

Calls can be much more effective than messaging for detecting and handling the XY problem now that users can easily screen share, because you can often see why the user wanted to do X, not just (as in their two lines of text) that they wanted to do X, and you may be able to solve Y and make them happier.

I enjoy being able to shoot the breeze with clients etc, and relate to each other. That's not to say I haven't worked for folks that I genuinely winced when they'd ask to jump on a call: it's more a matter of whether the relationship feels adversarial.

It's mentioned in the post, but it never hurts to repeat it here: https://nohello.net

It's been some years since I saw this site and ever since I always add context in all my on-line interactions with co-workers.

This blog post is definitely for people that have no desire to ever have social interactions

This is the best guide to improve anti-social behaviour in remote workers and disrupt teams. Just refuse to answer when people text you "Hello".

Oh, come on...

Am I loosing time waiting for your "hello" back? Well, guess what: maybe I took it into consideration the fact that you're busy, and that I might be waiting for hours, but not answering at all only makes you a jerk.

This is far from politely refusing "quick calls" when busy. And no: you can't be always busy: if you want to keep telling yourself you're working in a team you need to allocate a reasonable amount of time to social interactions.

Do you really expect me to send you a calendar event invitation to have a quick call with you once in a month? To update you about something that might even interest you? Maybe it's not going to be communicated in the most efficient way possible, as would be with an email, but certainly it will be done in a way that would keep us human beings, not mentioning the fact that it would also improve team work.

If you do, please do not expect me to sit next to you if we happen to meet in person, and be happy and friendly.

I can see a formal meeting, but a quick call? a hello? what's next? a text? an email? a chat message?

this dude sounds like an introvert that doesn't work well with others.

Has the "no-hello" crowd realized what the "hello" is trying to achieve? It's a method of establishing a synchronous conversation.

"Calls are ephemeral" is a feature, not a bug. Real-time chat should be as well. Slack storing messages until the end of days is an anti-feature.

Greetings are still ok, add your ask as well to save one step.

Ex. "Hello, good morning. When can you spare 10 minutes today to catch me up on PR reviews?"

Being this smug is a great way to get people to not speak to you at all. Enjoy your quiet productivity.

My favorite impact that I've had on my organization was the "no agenda, no meeting". It became a meme, minutes before the agenda-less meeting was supposed to take place someone would send it to a meeting chat or email, usually followed with ":)", especially if I were one of the attendees. In the rare cases I forgot to follow my own stubborn rule then it was a whole show, in hindsight, probably should've broken it at least once a quarter along with some penance to really help cement it.

However, I managed to "bully" everyone into following this simple rule because I had some influence in the organization; I was a manager of a large department. Unfortunately, interns will probably get an eye-roll for such suggestions, even if they reference their superior's rule.

My point is, don't send you colleagues this link, you will come off as rude. You'll get further by e.g. feigning surprise to the lack of agenda, and maybe you get to use that opportunity to spark a conversation about the importance of an agenda. If you're a manager and above, then by all means, use your influence to force it, it will make everyone's job easier in the long run.

Oh, as for the messages that contain only "hello", just ignore them, they will either solve their own problem or quickly jump to the point once they tire of waiting for your equally pointless response. Or just have a chat with your colleagues every once in a while, maybe they genuinely care about you and your cat.

I get the point. You want a quick answer, then ask the question directly.

I dont think the rule can be applied universally.

1) Cultural norms - This may not work in all environments

2) You have an issue which requires cross function help. Hard to frame a precise question when you dont know which features are the most significant.

For the chat issues brought up in this silly rant the most effective solution I've found is to create a culture of public chat rooms with your entire team, instead of individual direct messages.

"Quick Call" people are a personality type so they are not going to change.

> You probably received a link to this website because you did one of the common mistakes of working remotely

This is probably a factor behind execs crying "but muh productivity" and scaling WFH back.

These are huge distractions, agreed, but not answering messages like this or responding with _a link to a fucking website telling you how wrong you are_ will never not be perceived as asshole behavior.

A better approach is to _just respond to the message_.

Saying "hey! How can I help?" Takes two seconds to write. Shit, you could probably automate this.

Responding to asks for "quick chats" with "hey; I can't do a quick call right now, but happy to talk when I'm free. Mind scheduling something on my calendar?" is much more respectful and most folks will do just that.

Sorry for the harsh language. This is the kind of incredibly elitist and condescending behavior that make people like Eric Schmidt call us "arrogant" and spend billions of their own money finding a way of getting us out of the way.

I get the sense of this, and it's ok, too draconian. Maybe works for people like you if everybody is like you

But sometimes the question is fuzzy, to me "hey got a minute?" means "I'm about to unload something confusing on you, and I don't want to break your flow state, so let me know when you have a minute to take it"

I'm a tech like the author, and personally I'd prefer not to see all the details up front, because I can't control my flow and I'll start scratching at their problem right away even though I was busy doing something. I'd rather have the sign lit up that says they need help, WITHOUT KNOWING what it is, and then when I'm ready to help them, I'll find out. If it means I need to check on some stuff first, then fine, we'll set a meeting a for it at some point in the future (that's now the agenda), even if it's just "Let me get back to you in an hour about that"

It's also important not to get so caught up in the remote, ivory tower of self-importance of your work/time that you forget maybe interacting with your co-workers is more important than you think, even if it takes up time you'd rather have to do something else. If someone else is paying your salary, your time is probably not THAT important.

I am constantly annoyed by people's poor communication skills, but I find it much more efficient to lead by example and communicated back, sooner rather than be passive aggressive.

No agenda for meeting? Email back or chat in the group channel kindly asking for an agenda, maybe throwing in something useful along with it.

Co-worker sending me one of those "Hiya" type messages, well "Good morning! How are you today?" Sooner or later they get to the point and I schedule a proper meeting about it.

Sorry but if any one of my coworkers behaved or responded like this, I’m not sure we’d be working together anymore.

> There is another possibility - you're lazy and selfish, so you don't care how your interruptions affect others because your questions need to be answered right now with minimal effort on your end. But I'm sure that's not the case.

> So, when I answer your "Quick call?" with "What's the problem?", that's really for your own good :wink face:

Please do not ever write sentences like this in a professional context where you are not friends with the recipients, it's terrible.

It sets the tone to "adult to children discussion where I think that I am smarter than you" which is the last thing you want when you try to solve on of your pain point.

One the other hand if you want me to avoid interacting with you as much as I can that would be spot on.

This is great, but I wish there was a shorter and more to the point version for me to link folks to.

Each of the ideas in here is solid, but there's too much writing around the core idea -- a sentence or two for each point and then a tldr like "put in some basic level of effort if you're going to ask for others' valuable time." would do it for me personally.

Normally: no agenda, no need to attend. But since our team is currently small, we have a deliberately agendaless meeting every morning. We talk about anything: somebody's daughter got engage, an upcoming vacation, that gnarly engineering problem that never got resolved yesterday. It's an anti-standup, and it's designed to take the place of those transient "water cooler" convos.

It's incredibly valuable, but sure doesn't scale.

What about a quick coffee?

The level of entitlement in this post is ridiculous.

Dude. You're just an engineer from an Engineering department of some company.

Nobody's gonna read & apply any special rules of communnicating with you, especially written by yourself (sic!)

Meetings without an agenda and a published list of minutes and actions are effectively theft. You're stealing people's time and with that company resources.

However, having said that I've found these kind of "Hi can we chat" meetings are great ways of flagging corporate sociopaths and general losers. They make it their career to schedule as many of these as possible to get out of doing other work.

Yet another person who forgets that slack can, in fact, be closed.