I would rather the email honestly. IMs usually have the expectation that I'm going to respond to you "soon", which is an interruption/distraction. And they don't contain enough information so I have to start going back and forth with the other person.
At least with email, most people recognize that you will respond in your own timing in the next 24-48 hours. With IM I've found that expectation out the window.
Save the distraction. Send an email.
Aside: I REALLY hate the direction teams has taken more and more... like separating the various chat channels and activity notifications for calendar invites that are months away.
Down with ever-expanding threads. I try not to engage with them at all, preferring a briefing that explains why I'm being involved and the change in priority. If dragged in with a simple "see below"; looks messy, best of luck.
Thanks for being unprepared and showing your interest in staying that way. Helps me keep a safe distance.
Also I have a rule to never answer right away. Have at least 15 minutes cool down, asking person may figured out the answer by themselves. Unless it's my direct manager...
a) I can ignore it until I have time to look at it
b) You can see who else has already been involved in the conversation - seeing a fellow team member being involved can help avoid falling for situations where someone is trying to work around one of your colleagues who's already told them they can't have what they're asking for.
c) The chat message is from an individual, so you only get their interpretation of what's happening - if there's an email thread then there's going to be multiple people involved, each with their own perspective.
d) Someone spent some time forming and writing down their thoughts, which seems to be an increasingly rare skill these days.
This is increasingly ironic :)
I imagine this is more of a company culture issue than an e-mail vs IM issue.
I'll agree that the example of simply tagging someone in a long quoted thread is not the way to go. The sender should have included a summary and an explanation of why the new recipient is suddenly added.
If I get tagged on an email like this, I respond with something along the lines of: "what is the intention here? is it an ask or do i need to do something? do I need to be aware of something? please advise". This generally gets me a summary so I know what I am doing.
> Innocently, you click into the top email. The only text is "[Your Name] see below."
IMO this is bad behavior and it is right to push back. The person forwarding the email should provide context: what’s going on and why am I being included, what’s expected of me here?
If I’m just told to “See Below,” ok, I’ll see it. I’ll interpret that at an FYI for me, no deliverables requested (of course, an FYI might include the information about the needs of somebody who’s ass I need to kiss).
—
The ragebaity thing is to have a general rant against something pretty normal, but to only have an example based on obviously bad behavior. Is that Motte-and-bailey? Not sure, but it doesn’t pass my sniff test.
Especially when they say in the middle they already don't read email threads and use AI to summarize. But they still place a call to action at the end to not send email threads. Why would they want less context to feed their AI?
If mods on high granted the power I would certainly downvote this submission.
People who think they are too important to read the work emails their colleagues send them are generally awful to work with.
Some threads become difficult to unravel.
If you’re including someone new into an already running conversation, take the time to write a summary for them and why you’re now involving them in the conversation, and what you expect from them. No, don’t use AI to do it, that’s more offensive than “see below”.
But assuming you take the time to make sure it's actually good, this seems like a fine use for an LLM.
But it's also really helpful when someone at least summarize or reiterates the specific ask to me at the top of the email thread, rather than just CC'ing me on a reply with "+AA". That seems to be more what the author's complaint is about.
All the context are in there in the rawest of forms, you a run through them with your eyeballs or have your tools do the summarisation there and then. Most of the IMs I received didn't even quote the original message they were responding to, and I end up spending time jumping up and down the channel or group to get the whole context. Not to mention folks sending me link to a slack, which, depending on the mood of the almighty slack god, can or cannot be opened in the app / current slack session.
But you do you. :)
Then I can make bunch of people's work life easier by clarifying the state for everyone
What the article doesn't state but implies is when someone sends you an email thread, it should be a standalone message that clarifies the state of things and the ask. And if the reader needs the context of how something got there, they can refer to the thread history.
Not even that. Clearly someone was involved with an issue until I got involved. Whoever involved me need to explain the goal and the issue to me, then I can help. And that's the point. Someone wants MY help, so that SOMEONE needS to help me understand the history of it. And if that SOMEONE is unwilling to put in the time to do that, so why should I?
lol good luck doing Slack Thread archeology instead then.
(I'm not experienced with Teams but since its Microsoft, it's likely worse.)
The OP pretends they're actually placing all info into organized documentation in ... Confluence or something. I suppose in real time as the slack thread develops, because they aren't going to find anything a week later...
> (I'm not experienced with Teams but since its Microsoft, it's likely worse.)
Slack is a paragon of usability compared to Teams.
My guess is no one in the OPs organization remembers email etiquette. In theory with proper quoting you won't need to review all messages in a thread because the most recent one already has all the info.
Tbh i use email style indenting even when replying to Slack messages.
