It’s been a few years since I entered the professional world, and every once in a while, I run into patterns of communication that rub me the wrong way. They’re usually unintentional, and honestly pretty unimportant, but I find them interesting to analyze. This post goes through two of those patterns.
Ping Checks 🔗
This is something that I was always mildly annoyed by, but could never figure out why until someone pointed it out to me. Have you ever had someone at work send you messages like this?
I’m copying the name “ping check” from a Medium article I read a while back but can’t seem to find again. In theory, ping checks make sure both of you are online at the same time. But unless you’re trying to make a phone call, why would you ever need to both be online at the same time? The whole point of text messaging is that it’s asynchronous. We can each respond when we have time to do so, even if the other person may be busy.
To illustrate this point, let’s go through a hypothetical. Suppose you send me the ping check message, and I happen to be in a meeting. No big deal, I wait until after my meeting to catch up with my messages, and respond. Suppose then that by the time I respond you are now in a meeting. You now also have to wait until that is finished to send me the main thing you wanted to send. Between us, we’ve just wasted all of that extra time doing nothing of value. If instead, you had just sent the thing you actually wanted to discuss, I could have spent time writing the actual response while you were in that second meeting.
I understand why some people might do this: if you went up to someone in person and jumped right into a topic without saying hello, that might be perceived as a bit rude. Text messaging, however, is not a real life conversation. There’s nothing preventing you from saying hello in the same message as your main idea. In the grand scheme of things, is this that important? Probably not. But I think we’d all be a bit better off if we could recognize and remove this pattern from our communication style.
Heart Attack Prevention 🔗
I have a habit of overthinking things sometimes. In my career this can be both an asset and a liability, but in this specific case, it leads to a lot of sweat over what ends up (hopefully) being nothing major. So, knowing this, you can imagine my reaction when last year I received the following messages from my boss:
Now, as I was walking down the hallway I could only keep one thought in my head and that was “I’m definitely fired.” I mean, come on! If someone stays vague about “discussing something”, that means for sure that it’s something bad. It’s for the same reason no significant other would send the “we need to talk” message if it was about something good.
It turns out I couldn’t have been further from the truth; I was being promoted. After a huge sigh of relief I quickly calmed down and all was well. Those 90 seconds of terror could have easily been avoided though. If instead the conversation had gone like this, I would have saved a lot of sweat:
Being specific in what you want to talk about is ideal. It allows the other person to start doing the context-switching beforehand, so that by the time you actually meet, you’re both ready for the discussion. “Can I get your help debugging X” is a lot more helpful than “Can you come by and look at this?”. In the case of the above, if you want to keep it a surprise, you can at least tell the person whether it’s good news or bad news.
And that’s it. I hope you found this article a bit enlightening. Communication is hard, but we have the power to make it easier.