Peter Moriarty: The big risk with chat is this is a potential
interruption factory for your team,
it would be my preference that we didn't have instant
messaging, some very radical businesses don't, but teams tend
to then rely on email for internal communication, which is
the worst. So a healthy middle ground is to use something like
a sauna or Trello, or Monday or clickup, or any of the online
shared task and project collaboration tools which allow
threaded responses and they have, you know, really great
task management for internal work coordination, I always say
use those as a as a primary work tool. But there are still
there's instances, particularly if you have a team that are
geographically distributed, where you're going to need to
like check in with someone on something quickly, like, Oh,
hey, how's that project? How's that project going? Are you free
right now for a quick catch up? Or, Hey, I haven't heard from
that client yet, Could you could you follow them up on that
particular task. So that's when instant messaging comes into
play. And it's inevitable that we that we need to make use of
it. But with both an intelligent task, shared task management
system, and minimal use of chat, you should be able to completely
eliminate any internal emails inside your company, there
should not be a need for internal emails, email should be
the interface between you and the outside world or your
company, your staff and the outside world, your internal
communication tools should be what you do to get your work
done, the risk of doing any internal communication inside
email is it keeps your team stuck in email all day long. And
we don't want that, because they're getting the dopamine
hits of the new, exciting emails coming in their inbox all day.
And all of a sudden, you're spending six, seven hours a day
with your inbox open. And that's why people need the
notifications because they say, Oh, well, I need to see if
anything comes through. Not true. If you can move your
important work out of email, and just keep email for external
communication. Now, not many people expect an email response
within eight hours or six hours unless you because it was that
urgent that pick up the phone, if you are a customer service or
a helpdesk company, and you have a dedicated team, Manning and
help desk, that's a different story. It's their job to be on
email all day long. And for our team, that's our help mailbox.
And you know, we have that configured accordingly.
Hopefully, what we want to get you to the point where is you
know where it is you have your team, communicating on the
appropriate platforms for the utmost productivity for everyone
that's in your business. That's that's the idea here. So email
is for communicating just to summarize emails for
communicating with the outside world, your tasks and your work
coordination, you want to have some kind of task management
system with global Asana partners. By the way, I've got
heaps of info and videos and stuff on that, if you want to
chat about that, that team will help. But number three, we're
going to use chat as minimal as possible. So let's talk about
how we can get our notifications configured correctly to do that,
so inside we're going to go to settings, because I have my
notifications very, very fine tuned, I have recently switched
on sounds just to test it out. For most people, I would say if
you have a large team and you're receiving a lot of
notifications, I would switch off the sounds because that's
just going to trigger distractions. But if you send
and receive messages, if you're in an executive position, you
can switch on sounds, that's cool chat notifications. Same
thing, if you're in a role where you're getting a lot of chat
traffic, I'd probably switch off the notifications so you can
focus more on important work and then come to chat when you need
to check in with the team. But that's up to you. I switch off
the email notifications and make sure Smart Reply is switched on.
Now in an individual room, you can configure the notifications
for that room, which is which is pretty groovy. So in the team
room here, just going to click the team room. And I'm going to
go to notifications. So in the team room, you can see I've got
the option to notify always notify less, or notifications
off. Now for most rooms that I'm a part of, I'm going to switch
to notify less. So basically, I'm only going to get a
notification where I've been mentioned by name. Or if I'm
following a specific thread, if it's the kind of thing where you
want to monitor anytime someone opens a new thread in the room,
you can tick that box and new threads will follow
automatically. But I actually leave that off. So I click
notify less and drop that in here. And then you'll see here
that I now have the Follow button here. So anytime I reply
to a thread, it's going to automatically make me a follower
of the thread. See I've turned that into following
automatically. So any thread that I'm participating in, I'm
going to automatically be a follower and I'm going to get
notified anytime there are new responses. But if the team are
having their own chat here, and I'm not included, then I won't
get any notifications until someone mentions me by name or
they or they mentioned the whole room. And what this does is when
you have these rooms set up allows you to really see what's
going on in the buzz of your team and the buzz of your
company without having to and particularly if your team are
distributed without having to break down people's necks or
monitor computers or you know hit them up one on one. You can
just kind of see what the team are up to day to day. So the
team are I think chatting All right here. And that's just
going to automatically automatically update that. Now,
if you haven't used threads before, or you haven't seen
threads before, I do have a video on the channel, which
takes you through all the all the newbie tips on chat. But
this is the number one thing or the two or three things that you
need to learn. Number one, angels done this excellent
example here, if you want to start a new thread, you put the
title of the thread first, and then you start typing away. So
here is my title.
And then you start typing away with your actual message. And
what that does is it actually keeps the title of the thread up
at the top of the chat. So you can see here we've got a whole
bunch of people in our 13 people and our attract Team C boot camp
crew is there. But when you get a really big thread like this
one, it's got over 100 messages in it, you can see I know okay,
this is the boot camp thread just by looking at the top of
the thread because angels put that title in there. So that's
just a little bit of kind of like rooms etiquette where the
first little message that you put in there is the title of the
thread. And then yeah, the rest is there. So you know Instagram
reels is that one, they'll they'll kind of roll up nicely.
Now the one thing that Slack has got over this as it's not quite
as tidy as slack when you've got long responses and stuff, but
you'll you'll get used to it. The cool thing is, for example,
you know, with this thread, which has hundreds of responses,
at any point, if I want to like kind of exit myself in the
conversation, and the other team will just continue their chat, I
can just hit the Follow button unfollowed and then team can
continue chatting away. And so that kind of leaves it for
others to chat away, and they don't need to bother me but I
can jump back in at any point. Don't forget to like and
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