Source--Is Group Chat Making You Sweat

chatroom-hamster-wheel

Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. ~ Jason Fried

^29a8b3

https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat/

Main points:

Group chat is great for…

  1. Hashing things out quickly. When you need to toss an idea back and forth between a few people, there’s nothing better than chat. Toss in some words, drag in a picture, get some quick feedback, and move on (just get out quick before you get sucked back in).

  2. Red alerts. Sometimes it’s essential to get critical information in front of people. A server’s down, a deploy failed, there’s a crisis that truly demands a group’s immediate attention. There are a variety of ways to get this instant information to people, and piping it into a high priority chat room or channel is definitely one of those ways.

  3. Having fun. Fun at work is as important as work at work. And chat really works well here. Culture develops, inside jokes flow, emoji, goofing around with sounds (in Campfire), and meme generators are perfect territory for the chat room or channel. ^c69b21

  4. A sense of belonging. This is particularly important for people who work remotely. Having a chat room where you can just say good morning, let people know you’re out for lunch, and generally just feel part of something is a powerful counter to cabin fever.

The Negatives

Group chat as the primary method of communication across a group or organization leads to…

1. Mental fatigue and exhaustion.

Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. And in many cases, a dozen all-day meetings! You hear it from people all the time — it’s exhausting. Constant conversation, constant chatter, no start, no end. You can decide not to pay attention, but that leads to a fear of missing out.

2. An ASAP culture.

Now! At its very core, group chat and real-time communication is all about now. That’s why in some select circumstances it really shines. But chat conditions us to believe everything’s worth discussing quickly right now, except that hardly anything is. Turns out, very few things require ASAP attention. Further, ASAP is inflationary — it devalues any request that doesn’t say ASAP. Before you know it, the only way to get anything done is by throwing it in front of people and asking for their immediate feedback. It’s like you’re constantly tapping everyone’s shoulder — or pulling on everyone’s shirt — to get them to stop what they’re doing and turn around to address what’s on your mind. It’s not a sustainable practice.

3. Fear of missing out or not having a say.

If you’re not paying attention all the time, you won’t be able to have your say when something comes up. And since conversations happen quick, and then scroll away on the conveyor belt, if you’re not at your station when it’s your turn to speak, you won’t get a chance later. This encourages people to watch rooms/channels all day to see if a conversation comes up that they feel like they need to dive into.

4. Thinking a line at a time rather than a thought at a time.

^5e1f13

Most things worth discussing at length are worth discussing in detail over time. Because chat is presented one line at a time, complete thoughts have to unfold one line-at-a-time. But since people can jump in any time before you’ve had a chance to fully present yourself, making a point can become really frustrating really quickly. Further, incomplete thoughts and staccato responses make it really difficult to fully consider a topic and make important decisions — especially in a group setting. Imagine being in a meeting where everyone just spoke one line at a time, and people kept interrupting you while you were trying to make your point. Would you ever get anywhere? And wouldn’t it take forever?

5. Implied consensus.

“Because we talked about it in the chat room, everyone who needs to know now knows”. You know how it goes — people talk about some work in the chat room and nobody objects. That leads people to assume everyone read that discussion and agreed. Except that they weren’t, or they didn’t. Decisions get made without people’s consent because they weren’t there at the very moment it was discussed. This ties back to many of the points above — “right now” is rarely the moment to both have the discussion and come to a conclusion. ^d3a2a5

6. Knee-jerk responses.

Discussing something in a chat room is like being on the shot clock. There’s a small window of time to be heard before the point you want to respond to scrolls away. So people often just yell something out just to be heard. The same phenomenon can be seen on Twitter. An accelerating conversation leads to shallow sound bytes and talking points — no different than talking heads on TV that only have 3 minutes to make their point before the segment ends.

7. Pile-ons and devolving conversations.

A few people start talking about something. They’re doing great. But then another person tosses in a drive-by one-liner comment that takes the conversation in a new direction — and often not a good one. Then someone else comes in and tosses their 2 cents in. The original folks begin to lose control of the conversation. Something that was being discussed by just a few people ends up being a 6+ person conversation. Things devolve quickly. The medium encourages this breakdown since anyone can pop in and step right into any conversation without having the opportunity to get up to speed on the back-story. They may start strong, but conversations rarely get better over chat.

8. Rambling and repetition.

Conversations that should take a few minutes often go on for 20+ when they happen over group chat. Continuous conversations among a group of people are very difficult to end — especially when new people can pop in to drop in their quick 2 cents at any time. Just when you feel like the conversation is almost over, they can start right up again — often rehashing what’s already been discussed before. “We’ve already talked about this!” is a common refrain heard in chat rooms around the world.

9. Over-informing everyone in real-time.

I was talking to a guy a few days ago who was fired up about piping in sales data into a popular chat room whenever they made a sale. I asked him how many times that was a day. He said “dozens”. I said, so that’s dozen incremented unread counters in this one room throughout the day? He said yes. Then he said, “Is that bad?”. I said, do you think everyone need to know that sale happened right now? Might it be better to summarize sales once a day so you don’t interrupt people by incrementing an unread counter on everyone in the company a dozen times a day? He hadn’t even considered the impact, but now he’s seen the light. Be careful — it’s fun to hook things up and pipe stuff in, but what are the costs to people’s attention? Is it worth potentially pulling them away from their work a dozen times a day (you know how people love checking unreads) just to tell them something that could have waited until later?

10. Chat reminds you that you’re behind.

Group chat feels like you’re chasing something all day long. What’s worse, group chat often causes “return anxiety” — a feeling of dread when you’re away for a while and you come back to dozens (hundreds?) of unread lines. Are you supposed to read each one? If you don’t, you might miss something important. So you read up or skip out at your own risk. All the while you’re trying to piece together interleaving conversations that may refer to other things you haven’t seen yet. And just when you’re caught up, you’re behind again. It’s like your working two jobs — the work you’re supposed to do, and the work of catching up on what you missed that probably didn’t matter (but you won’t know until you read back).

11. 25 used to mean 1.

If you have one unread email, you see a “1” in your inbox. That one unread may be a complete thought, a dozen lines, or maybe even longer. But it’s a “1”. 1 unit to absorb. Compare that with the number of lines it takes to communicate the same thing in chat. Since chat is mostly one-line-at-a-time — even long lines — it’s an unread multiplier. A conversation that used to be a 1 or a 2 in email, is now a 25 or 40 or 100+. Plus all the other replies that come in as someone’s talking. Group chat breeds big numbers. The bigger the numbers, the more you’re missing. And the vicious cycle continues. This takes a mental toll.

12. Unread what? When conversations are represented by numbers in badges next to broad category/room/channel names, you have to enter to see what’s new and worth your attention.

The number doesn’t communicate what something is about, only that there’s something new to see. This makes it hard to judge what’s behind the number, so you have to enter the conversation already in progress just to find out what’s being discussed. This often pulls you into conversations that you don’t need to be part of right now. Contrast this with email’s tightly scoped subject headers and a readable list of participants that help you decide if you need to deal with it now, later, or not at all.

13. Manic context-shifting and continuous partial attention.

Most teams keep a chat window open all day on the side of their screen or on a second monitor. This invites you to keep one eye on the chat window, and the other on your work. Problem is that chat window is a black hole for your attention — constantly pulling your gaze, constantly chipping away at your focus. Playing whack-a-mole with unread indicators across dozens of rooms/channels causes manic context-shifting. Context-shifting robs you of uninterrupted stretches of time to concentrate on the work you’re supposed to be doing. Further, like your muscles remember repetitive tasks (muscle memory), your mind does too — and jumping around rapidly between conversations all day creates “attention residue” that makes it hard to clear your mind of the previous conversation before starting the next conversation. This makes it difficult to fully consider the conversation you’re about to enter. More on this in this wonderful Economist article.

14. An inability to review and reference later.

Ever try to go back and find an important conversation in a chat room or channel? Maybe you find a chunk, but how do you know if it’s the whole thing? Maybe the same thing was discussed with a different outcome a week before. Or 230 scrolls before. An endless conveyor belt of conversation turns everything into a series of fragmented moments where the big picture and full record is never clear. Where does it start? Where does it end? How do you know who’s seen some of it, all of it, none of it?

15. Lack of context.

When things are discussed in the same space, and the only separator is time, discussions lack context. It’s very hard to say “This conversation is about this document” because that document ultimately lives somewhere else, and the conversation is detached from the original source material. When you look at the document later, it’s unclear if there was a conversation about this document because the conversation lives elsewhere. This is a subtle point, but an extremely important one.

16. Presence, assumptions, and expectations.

Many chat platforms put a little green dot next to people telling you they are online/available. That’s called presence, and it’s worse than you might expect. It’s professional pressure to stay logged into chat. It’s saying “if you aren’t green, you aren’t at work”. Quitting chat suggests you aren’t part of the group. And that pressure forces you to keep a chat room open all day. Which forces you to absorb the blows of all-day distractions while you’re trying to actually get the work done you’re supposed to be doing. It’s just a modern version of the outdated butts in seats. Sure you can say do not disturb, but the true version of do not disturb is quitting the app.

17. Communication across time-zones.

Chat is often hailed as the essential tool for working remotely. And it is an important tool in the remote workers toolbox, but it’s a particularly bad one when you’re trying to work with people across time zones. Since chat is perpetually pointed towards now, and everyone’s now is different (your 9am is my 11am is her 3pm is his 8pm), real-time is the wrong time. Asynchronous communication is far better when working with teams spread across the world or even just a few time zones apart.

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