The Difficulty of DMs
withcardinal.com
withcardinal.com
Half of my output comes from trying to maintain the balance between accessible and productive. Some months are better than others, and the last couple have been bad. Too often I have my normal work, the surprise bit I didn’t think about, the nasty, low quality, test that’s making that take four times as long because I can’t see why it’s red, someone trying to figure out if we’re having a production or preproduction issue, and someone sending me “Hello” “…” in too close a proximity. It’s a recipe for burnout, and rationally the former should be the ones I focus/fixate on, but the last couple are outsized, as later insults often are.
Then again, managers work with people, so they should expect to deal with people problems, not dispassionate problems based entirely on objective reasoning. Objective reasoning doesn’t need to be managed.
I do try to move a lot of things to the Wiki or code docs, but there are inflection points where everyone doing a little starts to add up, and if you don’t have that critical mass it can be glacial and unrewarding. In those environments your reward is being summoned to the meeting because you have the info, and many people enjoy that feeling way too much.
We have Slack and sometimes people DM me... but I have been trying to push them to more accessible locations (like a team channel). Simply telling, "I think this discussion would be interesting for many people, let's continue in thread in #some_channel" works surprisingly well!
We do something similar for external requests: if a client sends a direct mail to me, there is absolutely no SLA covering my response times and I deliberately don't jump on the case. You have to be a little dickish to make this work, if you respond quickly to direct contact by mail/phone/other people will not start favouring the proper channels.
[1] also make it clear to people that what is urgent to them may not be as urgent to you!
If you have a new spontaneous question, you just create a new topic. It's never too crowded.
I've used DMs on Zulip a few times, but it was mostly to set up 1-on-1 meetings or ask for personal advice, not for sharing information that might be relevant to other people.
As if you can call someone else over in the physical space and they immediately have all the context of what y'all were already talking about. You'll have to give them a summary at least. Which is the same that happens when I pull them in on Slack DMs. Like with rubber duckying, it may not be a bad thing to gather your thoughts on the subject, and re-articulate them when you pull in a new person.
More generally I do agree, though, that DMs should be avoided by default.
I agree with the weakness of my open space situation in terms of having to provide context, but I think that's actually a spot where technology (like expanding discussions in Cardinal) really helps because the context can just be there automatically.