April 22, 2016  | Julia Becerra

Do Instant Messaging  and productivity  go hand in hand?  Two points open for discussion:

1-Email vs. IM messages: How do they complement each other without affecting productivity?

2-Is a text message or IM message as communication- effective at the workplace as a phone call?

For the longest time, we have been haunted by the always full Inbox. It seemed as if no matter how much time we devote to reading, responding and filing emails, it is almost impossible to have a Zero Inbox.  The day begins and ends with a number, be it 25 or 173. It is still there. You can pretend not to look at it; you can ignore it for a half an hour figuring it will not look so daunting after you have taken a break to attend a meeting or to go on a lunch break.  And yet, when you come back the inbox is not just there, but probably it is now bigger!  so you got to deal with it.

To break free of email, change some collaboration habits and perhaps improve productivity ,we have been embracing new  collaborating technologies: Dropbox, SharePoint, Huddle, Confluence, Igloo to name a few.

These tools help you  to break free of emailing messages as a way to reach out to colleagues to swap important documents  or to request their input on a given document or project;  it encourages  reaching out to the people you need ONLY when you need to do so and doing it on a more flexible less invasive way.

The idea was that sending fewer emails would increase productivity while keeping professional relationships and capacity for collaboration intact.   Fewer emails were thought to allow for a bigger chunk of uninterrupted time to actually focus on the essential tasks required to get the job done.  Any information needed in a timely matter could be obtained via a short phone call or even by walking over to your co-worker desk.

But how this actually takes place in the day-to-day may not always turn out that way.

We have also adopted the IM messages in the workplace with  the intention that  informal messages  get right to the point and don’t represent a big time commitment. So  Today, we may all receive less emails, but there is a huge amount of online messages all day; tweets. Texts, and IM (Lync)  messages to name a few.  And these messages can come at any time from different sources and they can get delivered to various devices.  These can be either more counterproductive than the all-purpose email.

Do they reflect a smaller fraction of time and attention that regular email does? Perhaps; but the expectations are different; they do require something else: Immediate answer.  When we are exchanging short messages we are expecting or even better we are pursuing a timely response; but we are doing it without having the benefit of the two-way in person interaction.   That brings up to other elements of the discussion: the conversational tone and the extinction of nuance and subtlety

As communication has shifted from face-to-face interactions to email, text messages, Twitter, Instagram, tumblr, etc.; people express themselves in short bursts of simple, straightforward statements.

Without the benefit of vocal inflection, facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and immediate response of a two-way conversation in person, a communication is just words — maybe with a few emoji’s, or emoticons.

If the meaning in a sentence is subtle, it might be missed.

If there’s a nuance in the meaning, it might be misinterpreted.

In a live conversation between two human beings, there is continuous feedback — non-verbal as well as verbal.

Today even satirical or sarcastic comments have to be obvious.

The software companies have tried to alleviate those concerns by adding emoticons; but seriously how many emoticons could you add  while at work when texting or messaging back at forth about a particular subject? And at what point people really just stop using them to minimize texting and maximize time response?

– Is the issue with the PC being fixed yet?

-Not but the technician is here 😉

-ANY WORD ON WHAT THE ISSUE COULD BE ?????

-Nothing yet ;-(

-WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG????????????????????

-He has been here only for 5 minutes. No need to yell Gosh!

-I AM NOT YELLING, I JUST HAPPEN TO HAVE MY CAPS ON.

You can probably think of how the constriction of communication is dehumanizing people’s interactions.  Instead of experiencing an in-person, real-time, lively conversation, we are in our own heads imagining how the other person is reacting to what we wrote.  Over time doesn’t that lead us to become more self-absorbed and less empathetic?  Taken to the extreme, we could start to live in our fantasies and delusions without the skills to read other people’s verbal and non-verbal cues.
Like a lot of other things in contemporary society, communication is surface level.  It’s quickly and easily digested. It’s boiled down and delivered in bite-size chunks.Anything else is prone to cause confusion, misunderstanding, and possibly insult.

How many public figures have gotten into hot water by posting messages that can be interpreted in multiple ways?  not to mention business deals that had gone sour because of them?

A friend of mine who owns real estate, was about to board a plane when he got a text message from his  tenant asking him  whether or not it was OK to extend  the property lease for another month;  He quickly replied. NP,(meaning No problem)  but the auto corrector in the text messaging corrected the message to NO.  He boarded the plane happy to know that he could count with another month of rent.  The tenant in the meantime was awfully annoyed by the fact that her landlord had given her a short negative answer giving her no room to talk any further.  Two weeks later when the landlord did not receive the expected rent he found out a bit too late, what had gone wrong with his text message.

I could mention a lot of stories of similar situations where a text message had gone out with a totally different meaning that it was intended to.

For example this twitter from Neil Patrick Harris where the auto correct when wrong:

So while messaging is a convenient communication tool, we should ask ourselves how effective it is in the office and what would be its role at the workplace in the foreseeable future.

As a society, it is sad to lose the warm resonance of human voices and laughter in conversational back-and-forth; A harmonizing of ideas and imaginations. Or a clever comment echoing back in laughter.

Now going back to the subject of emails and text and chats as tools to get our job done, there is one more concern: how to keep record of everything you write or the information you exchange? When everything is scattered across the internet in a way that makes harder to reconstruct an information flow on a particular subject?

I thought of some answers to this last question…. And  while I await for  your feedback, I will look for them in Evernote, my Dropbox, my google drive, my email, some SMS and Slack  or wait did I just write it  down on a post it?