Navigating Communication Tools in Modern Workplaces

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. You're here, we're here, we're going to have a conversation and we're going to talk today about communication, but more specifically tools and expectations. I'm Rob Brodhead. I'm one of the founders of Develop-Neur slash Building Better Developers. And on the other side is Michael. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Hey everyone, my name is Mike Milosz. I'm also one of the co-founders of Develop-Neur and also founder of Envision QA. So today we are going to first, I'm going to sort of give my thoughts on a couple of, we'll call them families of communication tools and sort of the expectations that I think are there. And these have grown up over the years where some of these things didn't even exist when I started out. Things like, actually most of this stuff did not exist. We didn't have text messages. We didn't, I mean, we had email, that was about it. And we had newsgroups, which is a whole different thing that nobody I think even follows anymore. But now there's so many different ways to do it. And then because they've come along really in a very short period of time, five to 10 years from a, when you think about professions and careers and things like that, that's actually a portion of somebody's career or professional development or the existence of a company and organization. And so I want to talk a little bit about standards. And if they're not standards that are out there, it's maybe how you want to go set your own standards or work with your organization to do them. First thing, and this is a little bit of a surprise to Michael, I was just like, hey, here's a cool thing. So I'm going to throw this out to him. So apologies if he stumbles or fumbles. It's my fault, not his, because I like just threw him a curveball. Now, the reason that this popped up is because I've had just in the recent weeks, I've had a couple of instances where I've had somebody sent reach out to me via various forms and I ended up doing, you know, responding faster than they expected. And I ended up sort of like disrupting my life when it really wasn't needed. It wasn't an emergency, which is not always a fun thing. It's like, hey, if you can push it back, you don't need to disrupt your life. I've also had people that I've reached out to and I've thrown something out there. And the next thing I know, they just spent five hours working through something when I really didn't need them to do that. It was one of those like, hey, if you've got time. And so there's also a clarification of our communications that I'm going to touch on. Now, the first thing is I want to talk about a couple of families of communication types that we have now. And the one is the instant. And this is, and there's sort of two levels of each of these. And so they're, for instance, let's think of direct personal, and then there's also professional. So for an instant, personal would be text message because it's your phone. You're probably, presumably you're carrying your phone unless it's a business phone, then okay, it's a business text. But most people you've got your personal number, somebody gets you a, send you a personal text. That's an instant, you know, practically like somebody poking you in the, on the shoulder saying, Hey, kind of thing. Professional sense would be more like our messaging tools that we are typically logged into during the day, such as Slack. Now those, those, because we are, they're much less, they're much more passive and much less active. Then I think there is a different level of expectation of responses to those. And then we move sort of beyond that. We get into more of the, we'll call them like the dialogue type things, which could be a text message, depending on how you do it, but more often it's going to be something like a mail message. Email is going to be pretty common for that. There may also be postings that you would put on like a particularly not live, not the kinds of tools people are constantly logged into like Slack. You're probably going to be logged into all day or teams, but if it's a LinkedIn message or Facebook message or social site message, that's something that, yeah, you may or may not get to that. So it probably has a lower priority and a lower guarantee of you being available. Now your mileage may vary. So you may be somebody that is always on Snapchat or something like that. And I know people like that or Facebook and then nobody's on Facebook all the time, I guess, but there are tools out there that people are on it all the time. And your friends and your family, maybe, and even maybe your profession, depending on what profession you go in, they may know that and they may use that tool for that instant messaging. And they're expecting you to, you know, they're going to send it and they expect you to read it within say a minute or so. That's your instant message style versus something that's like, ah, you'll probably read it in the next few hours. And then there's the longer term stuff that typically has been email or you can leave in a voicemail, which is like, you'll get back to it within one business day or something like that. Now from your expectations, and this is both sides of it, think about the expectations of the immediacy of the communication form you're sending, whether you're sending something or receiving something. So particularly if I ask Michael, if I say, Hey, can you check out this site? If I send him a text, then I'm probably expecting him to take a look at it. Like right now it's either that, or I'm, you know, it's one of two things. It's that, and he knows this, but it's, or I'm out somewhere and I just need to do that and we'll do this sometime. I just need to like do it before I forget. And usually that's what we will do because we want to be clear is if there's a text, it's going to say, Hey, check out this site. I just found it. Just wanted to let you know something along those lines. If it's something that is, and it's usually going to be more personal on that side. If it's something more professional, then we'll probably hit each other up on like a Slack or somewhere like that, where that person is probably available and it's probably going to be viewed during working hours. And so if you're getting something during working hours, it's probably work related stuff. It's something that from your professional point of view, you need to take a look into it. If you're getting something on a personal channel, like a text, then if it's work, it's usually going to be considered emergency, like urgent, because if I get a text, like I did today, I've got a customer that can reach me via Upwork. He can reach me via email. He can reach me via Teams. He can reach me via text. And something came up to the point where he had like sent something on Teams. He needed, he had some urgency, so he escalated it and sent me a text. And I was like, oh yeah, I have, I've missed that. Cool. And so took care of that literally right before this call started, because it was like, Hey, I can take care of this quickly. And that's part of, I think the expectations, if it's a text, it's either blowing up critical, got to be fixed right now, or I'm expecting that this is something that you can just like knock out real quick. And it's just going to be sort of like a, Hey, before we forget, can we do this real fast? If it's on a Slack or something channel like that, then it's going to be, again, usually a self-defined unit of work. Keep it, you don't want to, you're not going to have like big, long text messages or Slack messages. You might, but you probably shouldn't because people aren't going to want to read through that whole thing. They're going to keep it like a bullet point kind of level, send that to them. They'll address it and vice versa. Once you get it, you can take a look at it, address your item, respond to it, say, Hey, we got it. Move on. If you need to do something that's longer, there is this thing called a phone. So you can pick that up and call them. You can schedule a meeting, be like a zoom or something like that. You may do a jump onto one of the varying ways that you can do a remote call, remote conference, which is, you know, whether it's a video phone call or whether it's through one of your tools. And then you've got the, the longer thing of the more longer term, larger scope discussions, which usually is going to be email. Now, personally, that's when you just sit down with somebody and start talking to them. If it's professionally, the nice thing about email is it can give you a history of the conversation and you may get this through other tools, but email is one that everybody basically has access to. You're going to have an history of that. You're going to be able to walk through at your leisure. You're going to walk through that email and take notes, think about it, do what you need to do. So it should be that the expectation when you send an email is that they're not going to respond immediately, that you're not going to respond immediately. And that goes both ways. So if I send somebody an email, if I'm, if I get an immediate response, I'm usually shocked. I'm usually surprised. It's like, wow, I didn't expect you to read my email right away and be able to respond from a professional point of view. I think there's a, there's a value in not responding immediately. The whole point is you have this opportunity, and this is actually in all of these, but particularly the longer form, things like an email, you have an opportunity to read that email, read it a second time. Think about your response, craft something that is not a one line, like, okay, I got it. Unless it is what you can do with an autoresponderant that basically something that just says, Hey, I received your email. I'm going to take a look into it. We'll get back to you within one business day, something along those lines. Now that's sort of like, I know that's a, a very big umbrella that I put stuff under, but those are my thoughts. And those are just some of the things that I've got that have percolated up and developed over the years. And so now I'm going to take that big mess of stuff and set that in your lap for a minute, Michael, and what are your thoughts on these and how do you, look at this, how do you handle these varying things? And particularly when we're talking about personal, and also when you've got hustle vert, you've got like primary job versus side hustle stuff, all of these things that mix in and how do you see this and handle the varying levels of communications? So to start out with that, one of the things you kind of didn't touch on with the communication is also what type of job you have. Uh, if you have just a standard business job and lights aren't at stake, typically you're going to be less likely to respond immediately to a lot of messages. Uh, however, and Rob knows this because we both have worked in, uh, healthcare sectors or different sectors where life's potentially could be on the line. Software has to be up for, you know, mission critical, uh, things in those cases. Unfortunately, you are a little more wired into all communications because if you get an email, a text or something at two o'clock in the morning, typically not necessarily an email, but if you get like a text, a phone call, you know, there, if you get a communication at that time of day, you typically need to roll out of bed, log into your computer and find out what's burning. Uh, if you're not in a mission critical role, uh, and I've fallen into this trap for many years, Rob knows this, um, he's, uh, the first thing that came to my mind when you're talking about, you know, receiving that email, working until one o'clock in the morning. I remember a project we were on where it was like two days before new years and all of a sudden our test data stopped working and we had a presentation on July 3rd. And here I am working through new years, trying to figure out what to have happen. And we find out the next day that, oh yeah, this other team changed the API. So that's why nothing worked, but you don't know that, you know, you have miscommunication because the wrong type of communication is going out or the lack of communication is going out. Like you said, and one of the things I think prioritizing, uh, with all these communication leaders these days is number one, if you get a phone call, that should be number one, you need to just take that know that that's priority. Someone needs to reach you now. Typically that's number one. That's like mission critical. If they call something's up, you need to answer typically the second level of immediate communication that I tend to deal with a lot is personal text messages. So I do respond to those, but then once you start getting into the other media types, like Slack teams, uh, LinkedIn, uh, well actually we'll put social media aside for a month. So just like Slack, LinkedIn, like Upwork, things like that. Typically you tend to watch those during business hours, whatever those may be. Now, unfortunately with me, with side hustles and multiple projects going on, typically a nine to five or isn't my typical day. Typically my day will start maybe at six, seven o'clock in the morning while I'm having coffee to make sure I didn't miss anything critical to maybe eight or nine o'clock at night. Yeah. I only tend to watch them a little bit more than I should. Email definitely, uh, is the last, uh, line of defense. I barely checked that maybe, uh, three, four times a day, uh, picked up a good habit from, you know, the five hour work week, really business emails. I check it like at lunch and like two, three o'clock in the afternoon. And then work email isn't checked again for the remainder of the day. Personal email. I tend to check that a little bit more, but I am getting a little bit better with that. But then you throw in the social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, uh, you know, Instagram, if you're not dealing with the side hustle, if you're not running a business and you're just working, typically you're going to just, uh, be on those when you want to be on those, just be careful that it does not become a crutch, that that's all you're doing that you're staring at your phone all day and you're just missing luck. If you're working though, if you're running social media campaigns, then you tend to run into that double standard where it's like, okay, am I looking at my phone for personal or am I looking at my phone for work? So you kind of want to set some boundaries there, uh, when you're dealing with social media, it's that you kind of segment the two. And then lastly, before I throw it back to you, Rob, one of the things I've noticed over the last few years and Apple's great at this in terms of the way that this and Google's got it too, is you can now set like, do not disturb you, which can limit what communications come into your phone at certain times. So now during the business time, I have limited all my personal contacts to just emergency contacts during the day on my phone. So like, if someone picks up the phone to call me, it's going to be a work number or a primary contact, anyone else, it just goes to voice. The other cool feature that, uh, Apple Institute was, uh, like this, uh, like the screen time app or screen time configuration, and now you can actually turn off things that you don't need to be wasting time on, like Facebook, uh, LinkedIn, anything you don't need to be doing during the workday, turn off. Anything you don't need to be doing after your workday, you can turn that off and have that be your personal time. So you can have business time, personal time. And then there's other different things you can do. Like you can set up emails and things like that. You could also even turn on, you know, away, uh, from like Slack teams and that nature. That's one other thing to be careful of with communication, because if you have that on and you log in at 11 o'clock at night and your boss sees you, your boss may say, oh, he's working, let me reach out to him. You don't necessarily want to be available all the time, but you do want to be available and work when it's available. And work when it is an emergency. Now I want to, that's actually, that's a great area is the notifications. Um, and I was just, that was just reminded me that I had a Gmail on my phone has got an override. So even though I shut everything off, I've got quiet time. It woke me up at three in the morning where it was like, and it was silent, but my, you know, my phone lights up the room when there was some email that came through it and I was like, what the heck is that? So I just made sure I turned up cause it had a allow critical or time critical emails to come through. Anyways. I'm like, no, there is no such thing as a time critical email for me. So I'm going to shut that off. Now think about the statuses is actually, I think an invaluable tool to use to communicate with others, particularly because I don't know how many people do it personally, but professionally, a lot of people will sort of keep an eye out of people's statuses on whatever their tool is, whether it's like a teams or a Slack or something like that. And it's really valuable to have that. But it's also one of those things that be careful how much you use it. Because if you want to go heads down, or if you're in a call, you know, like you're on a meeting or something like that, where you cannot be disturbed or do not want to be disturbed by all means, put yourself in your busy status or whatever your setting is. But if you're just like, Hey, I just don't want anybody to bother me. And I could take a call, but I'm not going to, if you overuse it, then basically everybody's just going to ignore it. It's just going to send you stuff all the time. Anyways. Now that may or may not matter, but it may be something where your device, your tool, your platform batches all that stuff up so that when you do turn your status back on, it's like, you get flooded with all of that stuff that it was queued up waiting for you to become active again. So check it every so often. It's just the same thing. Now, granted, this is a personal issue or whatever that I, it's probably other people sometimes is when you've got an inbox, it's got like 4 million different, you know, 4 million items in your inbox, it's like, okay, that's just too much, you've now made that a useless tool to communicate with you. Now, if that's your junk box, awesome. This delete everything, but don't leave the 20,000 messages there. Unless you're just trying to say, look, I get a bunch of spam every day, week, year, however long it is. So, yeah, I think there's, there are, that is a nice thing is there's a lot of tools out there that are now, and the people are becoming an organization is becoming more cognizant about the impact of working 24 seven and helping us find ways to, you know, to sort of get back inside all of that stuff so that even though we're remote and we could work anytime that we don't want to, that we want to work our hours and don't be afraid to, and by don't be afraid, definitely communicate with your team, particularly if you have an open schedule, communicate what your hours are. This is a, again, a personal peep of mine because my team works whenever the heck they feel like it. However, and they, and sort of work their way into what hours work best for them. Which is fine. It's just, it is very helpful for me and helpful for them actually to know what their hours are, because if they're not on there, you know, technically not in their working hours and I send them a request and it made me that I do it in a way that I'm expecting them to respond fairly quickly because I think they're in working hours, but if they're not, you know, if their status is, you know, active or something like that, or if their status is always away, then I'm going to send that in. I don't have a, any indicator that, Hey, they're on it. You know, this is their schedule. But if I know that, you know, Hey, Michael runs a, you know, he usually doesn't come in until noon and then he works till midnight. Then I'll know that. So if I send them something in the morning, then I'm doing it, not expecting him to talk to me until later. Or if I, I'm going to be hesitant, like, you know, to put a phone call in or something, cause I'm not calling him at his work desk at that point. I'm interrupting his personal time. So don't be afraid to put that kind of stuff in there, schedule those things usually, especially if you have a place that is very big on calendars, don't be afraid to like block out that, you know, I'm going to go to lunch for, I'm going to take a 30 minutes lunch and I'm going to be gone. You don't have to put lunch there. Just put, you know, meeting or something, or if you need to focus on like sometimes like, you know, a review process or training or something like that, block that stuff out. So then other people can see, okay, you're not available then. And they'll schedule around it. And if it's an emergency or higher priority, they'll say, Hey, can you move something and then go ahead and do that. Thoughts on that? Actually closing thoughts on that. Cause we're, we're going right through this. One thing we didn't touch on, and this is something from the AOL days that I think unfortunately has engraved itself into our society back when it was really cool to get that little, uh, pop up you've got mail has turned into all these beeps, bops, vibrations, whatever that you are constantly anxiously. You hear a noise. You think, Oh my God, I gotta go check my messages. Turn that crap off. If you want to have a life and be saying, turn that off or like Rob was saying, schedule meetings or if you use your tools. So like I said, iPhone, uh, allows you to block off time. So you can actually put when you go to sleep. So there's a little thing. If you actually set up the alarm or sleep time on the phone, once it hits that it turns everything off. It will only allow your personal, uh, uh, like calendar or contacts to call you directly. Um, otherwise everything else is turned off till you wake up past your wake up time, or you turn that off. Slack has similar features. You can actually put time on your work hours. So it shows you available. Slack also gives you the ability to, uh, put in like busy time. So like when I first log in in the morning, I'm online. Yes, I'm on Slack, but for the first hour, all my communications are muted. Now, if I have Slack up and I'm watching, sure I can respond, but it turns off that notification, so I'm not constantly being distracted. I could check my email. I can try to, uh, recap what I was doing the previous day. So don't let communication devices, apps rule your life. Take the control back, look at the device, look at the tool and figure out. How it allows you to configure when you're available, when you're not available and make sure, make sure that you are clear with your customers, your friends, your boss, that these are the hours I work. I will only respond during these times. If, and only if it is an emergency, call me, you know, don't leave it all to text messages, you know, if it is a priority one mission control, you know, critical call, you know, don't forget, you know, that's the whole point of a phone is to call people, not text, not email. That's the computer feature. A phone is a phone. Everything else that they crammed into these things these days is a computer. So with that, take your life back, you know, get that work-life balance back. I agree. And that's, that's a perfect wrap up for this. I will add only on the, um, the quiet time notifications you can do. It's actually, that was a life-changing thing for me to be able to just have at night my iPhone just at a certain time, it's just shut. It goes into night mode and it doesn't wake up again until the next morning. And I have, so really the only people that get ahold of me are close family, like in a few exceptions, everything else, it just sits there. So if I wake up at three in the morning and I want to check email or messages. Awesome. But if I don't want anybody to get ahold of me, they don't. And the only people that I have there are the ones that it would be critical or an emergency do so. So now it's time for you to go out there and like start playing with all your settings, turn off all your notifications, get all your stuff set up. Like these, these really are key things to making the tools work for us instead of us work, you know, the we're slaves to the tools. There is a book actually, she can find it right now. Um, go take a, you can go take a look. It's called the, it's either, I think it's called the 40 day digital fast, or it's just called the digital fast. And it is about, it comes out of fasting and not eating and doing other stuff, but the idea of like getting away from devices and it's not a throw all your devices out kind of thing. It's really, especially the prep part of it, the first part of the book where it's like, okay, if you're going to prepare yourself, cause we do need digital devices professionally, we use them all the time. But it, it tells you about it. It's a lot of really cool little things that I didn't know about. For example, last one, and then I'll wrap up on you guys go is you can put your iPhone into a black and white mode so that it is all of the colors and everything like that disappear. It really changes. It's like, you don't like looking at your iPhone as much anymore. Cause it's not as pretty. However, you cannot play wordle because all of those like yellow, green, red but squares that you get, they're all black and white now. So if you have something that you do, even though you don't want you, you want to have your digital fast, you might have to be careful. That being said, be careful out there. Go out there, have a good time. Enjoy shutting off some of your notifications and we will come back and check her out in with you next time around with whatever our latest little bit of advice at Eve or soapbox moment is as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.