I don't know if there's any universal etiquette, but personally I find it highly annoying when people abuse notification levels. Most room-like chat systems have a way to notify everyone in the room, like @here. IMO, you should only use that if your message is both important and time-sensitive for every person in the room. Sorry, no, it's not important to everyone else that you can't figure out why something isn't working.<p>Even more annoying is the people who post a message with max notification and lots of words about how it's super-urgent, and then don't respond for half an hour when you ask for more details. I guess it's not really that urgent if you can't be bothered to pay attention to responses to your question.<p>Or people who post screenshots of long error codes that you'd want to look up. If you want me to spend my time to figure out your problem, please take 5 seconds to copy and paste the error code so I can search it in other systems easily.<p>I also find it annoying when you help someone with some random thing, and they now decide that you're now their universal go-to mentor and expect you to fix all problems with everything.<p>ESR's page on How To Ask Questions would be a good read for a lot of such people: <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html</a>
Broadly speaking: Be considerate of others' time.<p>Specifically:<p>- Be concise and quick. Write out a succinct message, review it, include necessary links, and then hit send.<p>- Avoid formalities ("Hey" "How are you" "Do you have a minute?"). Just get to the point and let them respond when they're ready.<p>- If it should be an e-mail, send an e-mail. If it needs to be a meeting, schedule a meeting. If it's best discussed in person, find the person. Resist the lazy temptation to use instant messages for everything.<p>- Watch the hours. If it's 9PM at night and you don't need a response by morning, wait until morning to send it. Or send an e-mail.<p>- Use group channels when appropriate. If you're discussing something the entire team needs to hear, use the team channel. If you're having a back-and-forth debate with one person, take it to a thread or private message.<p>- Show you've done your homework. Before asking someone for help, be prepared to list what you've tried and why it failed. Don't ask coworkers to help you with things that could be answered by reading the documentation or using Google.
I'll try to list a few that other comments here haven't mentioned:<p>- Don't be needlessly vague. Instead of saying "we need to chat, can you hop on Zoom?" say "we have a new development in project X, can we chat about it on Zoom?" Instead of saying "I need help," say "I need help learning how to use this API." Instead of "can you look into this?" ask for what you actually need.<p>- Instead of sending a screenshot of text, send the actual text. It's rude to force the recipient to re-type the text to (for example) search for the error message in their code.<p>- Don't use leet-speak or other shortcuts. Writing 'u' instead of 'you' makes the recipient feel like you don't respect them.<p>- Check that instant messages are the right format for what you are trying to do. Sometimes writing a document and sharing it is a better approach.<p>- Follow the conventions in a channel for using threads. Threads become more important in high-volume channels with lots of concurrent conversations.<p>- If a channel has a welcome message with instructions, pay attention to them!
This is a bit of a personal pet peeve, but I absolutely despise it when people close messages with the phrase "Please advise."<p>It's the fakest sounding attempt to be professional that drives me up a wall.
Every message should be actionable at the time of receipt. That means no “hey” followed by silence until there’s a response. As an extension of that, a message should only be sent when you’re available to continue the conversation unless otherwise stated. We must show respect for the attention we are grabbing by choosing an instant message. I often start a message with “this isn’t urgent, reply at your leisure”.<p>Basically just pretend you’re emailing.
One thing I've always liked is when people use the formatting their messaging client provides. Making points in bulleted lists, paragraph breaks, proper linking are all great.<p>Another good one is if you have multiple questions to split them from the main body and number them. It makes it easier for people to respond to them partially and specifically, and see they're there at all.
Write out your entire message and only then hit send.<p>Don't type out "Hi" and hit send, then write out one sentence and hit send. Then have another thought a minute later and hit send. Doing that selfishly occupies my attention for too long.
Only contact me by IM and say what you need in a single message first. I’ll get to it when I can. Don’t assume read means I even digested it.<p>Don’t email me, I won’t read it (lol seriously fuck email). Don’t call me I won’t answer.<p>If we need to talk or video, give me at least a days notice.
My advice: Take everything people say here with a grain of salt. There are lots of cultures and subcultures around IM, and they do conflict. It also varies with age/generation. You will not get much that is universal.<p>As an example, I can already see the common advice on not writing "Hi" IMs. Plenty of people at my company complain when people jump right in without these perfunctory messages. Plenty of <i>other</i> people at the same company complain when people do write these messages.<p>Whatever consensus that forms will be outdated in a few years anyway. The ground constantly shifts.<p>And don't even get me started on whether to end a sentence with a period!