Herding Chats
"Chats" is only one letter away from being "Chaos"
Your Triage Shield1 is now successfully protecting you from your email inputs2. Now it’s time to protect yourself from a more elusive input, your chats.
For email, volume is the biggest stressor. But for chat, it’s less about the volume and more about the location. Do you know where all of your chat messages are? Your personal chats, typically accessed on your phone, are spread across whatever collection of messaging apps you and your friends use: built-in phone messaging (SMS/MMS), WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, etc. Your work chats, more typically used on your computer, are all in whichever team collaboration app your company is using, e.g. Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, or WhatsApp Communities. But where inside this collab app are they? There’s the obvious direct messaging view that is front and center in the collaboration app. But then, within each of the 25-50 (or more) workgroups you’re a member of, there is a distinct communication feed for that workgroup.
Team-based communication is far better than the unfiltered communication of email and direct messaging, where you feel like a switchboard operator jumping rapidly and randomly amongst a sea of disconnected conversations. When a group of people are working together, they create a workgroup (in Teams, a workgroup is called a “Team”, in Slack, it’s called a “Channel”, and in Google Chat, it’s called a “Space”) in the collaboration app. All content produced by the team resides in this workgroup, including files, meeting notes, and project schedule. And all communication for that team happens inside this workgroup. With all the communication happening within this self-contained workgroup, you have an easier way to track the history of that team, and it’s easier for a new member to the team to get all the relevant context to ramp-up more quickly on the work.
But there is a significant drawback with team-based communication. Moving communications out of one central stream means that the individual who is doing work across many different workgroups will find it more challenging to stay caught up on top of all of these different conversations. I have seen very organized people that try to stay up on everything happening across all of their workgroups, and then typically in a matter of weeks, they throw up their hands and say, “Just direct message me if you want me to see it.” This is the reason why “@ mentions” are used so heavily in workgroup communication.
The alternative to admitting defeat (and furthering the “always @ mention everyone” trend) is designing your triage shield for chat inputs, wherever those inputs may be found. For chats, you don’t have a single triage room like you did for email. Instead of one inbox, you’ve got triage rooms galore. So the triage process for chats focuses on reliably finding all of the chats that need to be triaged.
Here’s how you build your chat triage shield.
When to Triage Chats
Replying to every chat as it comes in is a great way to let your entire day pass by without getting any of your real work done. This is why my “Control Your Phone, Or Your Phone Will Control You” post3 includes as pro-tip #2, “Turn off every single notification … Yes, all of them. Yes, that one too.” Once you have your triage process in place for chats, then you can rest assured that you will never miss your chats, and you can stop being a Pavlov reenactment.
From the email triage2, I called out that I triage my email three times a day (start of day, midday, and end of day). Each time I triage my email, I also triage my chats. If I end up with free time during the day outside of these preset triage times, I will more likely do a bonus triage of chat before doing a bonus triage of email, because there is a higher expectation of responsiveness for chats than there is for email. And, typically, the chat triage process is much shorter … once you have everything setup right.
Direct Messaging
Your chat feed is chronologically ordered, with more recent conversation first. This is just like the default sort order for your inbox. The fundamental difference is that once you’ve read a chat message, that thread doesn’t disappear. It’s an ongoing conversation, and simply changes status from unread (normally indicated by bolding or a dot) to read. If your messaging client has an unread filter, then you can toggle this on and get the more satisfying experience of “empty feed == triage complete”.
If you don’t have the unread filter feature, then I recommend reversing your triage order. Start the triage process off by scrolling down to the least recent unread chat and then work your way up from there. This makes it far more likely for you to bury an unread chat below a screenful of triaged chats.
What kind of information do you typically get in direct message chats? Here is the process to follow for each of the most common categories:
General conversation - this is the original reason for chat messages. You’re having an asynchronous conversation with one or more people. Triaging a general conversation chat is simply reading the chat and then optionally replying to move the conversation forward.
Request for something - in work chat situations, it’s common that asks come to you via chat. If you accept the request, then create a new page in the Actions section of your work management system. If the ask is contained within a single text, then copy the content of that text to this new page. If there’s more of a back and forth exchange that leads to this ask, then screen shot the dialogue and paste that instead. Add a note to the page that says this ask came from a chat and give the individual’s name or group chat name where this ask came from, so that you know who to reply back to when you’re done. Reply to the chat acknowledging that you accept the ask, and provide an ETA if possible.
Sharing media - “Check out my latest favorite cats video.” “This comedian is hilarious.” “Here’s a podcast I think you’d like.” If it’s under a minute, then just watch / listen and give your reaction. If it’s longer, and you want to make sure you follow-up on it, then give it a proper home in your External Brain4. When someone sends me an article, video, or podcast that I want to follow through with, I will create a page in the “Inspiration Q” section of my External Brain. I will record who sent me that recommendation on that page. Then I will respond back on the chat, “Thanks for the reco. I have put it in my Q to read/watch/listen.”
Meeting coordination - when it’s time to schedule a meeting, and it’s not easy to figure out people’s availability, chat is a great way to work out a date and time. Keep these coordination conversations moving forward, and then once you’ve arrived on a timeslot that works, create a meeting invite and send it. Then you can reply on the chat, “Meeting invite sent. Looking forward to catching up.”
The above triage process can be applied to all chats that you receive, whether via the standard direct message model or as part of the team-based communication found in workgroups. Now let’s focus on the more complex team-based chats scenario.
Team-based Chats
Workgroups are easy to create, and they have no organizational limitations. It is quite common to find yourself a member of dozens of different workgroups in your company’s team collab app. Workgroups for subteams is obvious, but then you have workgroups for any culture initiative that’s started, or any local project that you opt to participate in. Over time, the list of workgroups you are tracking will grow until it is pages long.
Fewer Workgroups == The Easy Button
If your list of workgroups is less than a page, then there’s a simple solution. Most every team collaboration app has an unread filter toggle that will apply to your direct messages as well as your workgroups. By toggling this on, you have a simple triage view of everything unread. As you read and process each chat, it will disappear from this filtered view. Empty view == triage complete.
As long as the time it takes you to triage remains small, you can continue pushing the easy button. But when you notice the amount of unread items increasing, it may be time to take your chat triaging to the next level.
More Workgroups == Get Yourself Organized
Once the list of workgroups you belong to is longer than a page, it’s time to take a more organized approach. You can do this by configuring each workgroup based on your needs. You can think of this a similar preparation to the building of inbox filter rules in the email triage process2. This is a one-time setup cost that will accelerate every subsequent triaging of your chats.
The default configuration for every application these days seems to be “maximal notification”. And while it is usually simple to reverse this in accordance with my “Turn off every single notification” mantra, it is more nuanced in a team collaboration app. This is because “notifications” itself is a nuanced term. The notifications that you need to turn off are anything that is designed to interrupt you, either with a bing or with a banner. Acceptable notifications are ones that do not interrupt you, but rather put information into a channel that you can see and respond to on your own time, such as the email you get from your financial services provider to notify you of a stock sale transaction that has been completed.
For team collaboration apps, you can set default notifications that apply to all workgroups. So, you could simply change these settings to follow my “no distractions” rule by turning off every audible and visual notification, and having any notification be sent to you in the form of email. The problem is that a standard volume of activity across dozens of different workgroups that you belong to would turn into an overwhelming email triage process.
The better path to sanity is to first set app-wide default notifications, and then set workgroup-specific notifications for each workgroup. Set the app-wide notification default to only “send mail”. Even better, if the collab app has a “show in feed” option (e.g. Microsoft Teams has a rich Activity Feed that you can leverage here), then use that setting.
Once the notification default is set, now it’s time to go through each workgroup and ask the following questions:
Do I need to be on this workgroup? If not, leave the group. One less stream of noise to have to triage.
Is this workgroup strictly for reference sake? If so, then that means you don’t need to be watching changes as they happen. Instead, you just plan on visiting this workgroup when you need to get information. Turn off all notifications for this workgroup.
Is this workgroup high priority? Either reorder the workgroups to put this near the top of your list, or if collab apps has a “pin workgroup” feature, use that. This will make these workgroups top of your triage order.
Sharpen the Saw
Just as the final step in the inbox triage process2 was “Repeat indefinitely”, every triage process ends with a refinement step. You have to embrace the Actor/Observer duality5 and be observing your own triage process as you follow it. What can be further tuned for optimal triaging going forward? Do I need to leave or silence more workgroups? Are there new features offered by the team collaboration app that could simplify my chat tracking? All of these collab apps are relatively young and change rapidly. When Jevan and I published pro-tips on Microsoft Teams notifications, we were updating those pro-tips at least every six months.
When your email and chat triage processes are complete, you will instantly feel more in touch with your team and with the larger organization. And when you streamline these processes, you will feel a weight lifted off your shoulders, recognizing that what used to be a vague and ever-present stress is now a simple administrative process.