Jacen's Rants

IT Pro Tip - Practice Effective Communication

May 13, 2025

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In my bio on Discord, I have links to No Hello and Don't Ask To Ask. Unfortunately, I can't do the same on Teams, so I have to deal with lots of inefficient text communication at work. Let's go over exactly why these pet peeves irk me so much.

Questions like "do you have a second?" are polite in face-to-face communication, but completely useless in asynchronous communication. While in live communication you need to make sure the other party is attentive during the conversation, the entire appeal of asynchronous communication is being able to read and reply at your own pace. Messages like "can I ask you a question?" put an unneeded pause in the conversation and slow things down for no reason.

While it only takes a few seconds to respond to these preamble questions, the time to respond doesn't really tell the whole story. I now need to pause whatever I was working on, respond to your question, and either wait for you to ask the real question or resume what I was working on just to pause it all over again when you reply. Especially for someone like me who doesn't multitask very well, this is a pretty major disruption.

The other advantage of asynchronous communication is the ability to send multiple messages at a time, so if you really want to include a greeting, you can send your "hello" in addition to your question without waiting for a reply to the greeting. There is no practical benefit to "asking to ask", so please just skip that part entirely. It really does go a long way in keeping communication flowing efficiently.