I’ve given up trying to use chat as chat. It’s just another inbox now. All notifications disabled and instead its another “pull” mechanism. i’ll look in on Slack or whatever when i’m doing my rounds every couple of hours processing all my inboxes - pull requests, emails, blog notifications etc. Any chat threads get treated with the same GTD process - delete it, delegate it, do it or defer it.<p>I feel much more content controlling blocks of time to be productive instead of trying to run that chat treadmill.
> Not responding immediately or within a day could label you rude or non-collaborative. Even if you didn’t want others to feel like that, the receiving end of a chat message couldn’t help it. They felt they needed to respond immediately.<p>It really depends on the expectations of the team and the culture of the company. I suspect this is the same attitude that would manifest itself in the office as people randomly walking up and asking a question, thus disrupting the thought process. Some companies fare better than others in respecting people's time and concentration.<p>The author is organizing everything in Basecamp projects, and I'm glad that works for them. Basecamp is a great tool. But a similar process is possible with chat. We use Webex Teams (eating our own dogfood, by way of disclaimer) and organize ourselves in teams (pun intended) where there are many rooms for various topics. The general expectation is that participation is async unless you're @-mentioned. If one requests some task to be done and it's not some quick thing, the answer is usually "create a Jira ticket for me".<p>One of the limitation of chat systems such as Teams and Slack is when people try to use them to keep track of work items. That creates stress. But for ongoing topics that one can join or leave at will, it's rather useful. And if the discussion becomes something that needs to be sychronous, being able to instantly start a video call, hash it out then go back to other work is way better than back-and-forth in text, be it in a chat room or project management system.<p>The other point that the article touches on which is super important is leadership happens is actively involved remotely. That prevents relegating remote workers to second class status.
So it's not just chat, but how Basecamp combines chat with a message board, allowing for a less pressing non-async alternative for certain types of communication. The secondary effect is the async chat kinda sucks which pushes people towards using the message board when they otherwise wouldn't?<p>This is interesting. Often constraints make for a good experience. But in terms of solutions to apply more general to other companies it's difficult to nail down here (besides of course adopting Basecamp).<p>As the author mentioned they tried having a sync backbone with Github Issues but eventually everyone just started using Slack for everything. I'm curious if a Slack company did a better job of directly integrating a sync message board feature if it would be used. Or would it require totally rethinking the product + a workplace culture/methodology.
<i>The fact that chat sucks in Basecamp has some downsides of course. I often want to drop a code snippet and ask something. That’s difficult.</i><p>For a small team, we really don't have any downside really except this one. All pings and project campfires are riddled with screenshots of small snippets of code. I've tried moving my team to Mattermost or Slack, but chatting on Basecamp is a hard habit to lose. If there's a better way to do this in Basecamp I'd like to know.