One assumption I see a lot is that your top priority is NOT the top priority of the person you are disturbing (I used disturbing on purpose). If you have a 100% dedicated team that (which is ideal) that is great – assuming the person you are talking to is on the team.

I think you need to consider who you’re talking to and be sure to ask “is this a good time, if not what is?”, before jumping in. Tough to do, I know I don’t always remember to do that.

Also, consider that while high bandwidth may be the desire, sometimes what you need to say is better put in some other form (at least to start). If your goal is have the message received and understood and receive feedback – email may work to begin that process, followed-up up with a conversation. Even bringing over a diagram or document you mocked up could work to move the conversation forward faster to get to your goal.

When using IRC I generally like two channels. The first is a general channel which can be ignored if you get immersed in something. The other is an “emergency” channel which acts as a priority interrupt. I tell people to use the 2nd channel only if it really is an emergency of some sort. I can then put alerts on just the one channel and get some visual cue when something important needs to be looked at.

See my posting from last year on how Microsoft Outlook (or any other email client) is often configured in a way which is anti-productive.

- Bob -

In my opinion email, no matter its form is always low-bandwidth. You simply can’t type fast enough to make it high bandwidth.

Voice, to me, is higher bandwidth because almost everyone speaks faster than they can type. It is also bi-directional in near real-time where email is not.

The NMI (non-maskable interrupt for non-techies, meaning you can’t stop it from occurring) problem is real with voice (phone for example). However, in my experience, a small amount of NMI work makes everyone more productive in the long run because decisions are made much faster.

As for logging, I tell my classes that whenever a decision is made, it needs to be logged somewhere because someone else will eventually need the information. IRC and email provide “logging” but what good does it do if the person needing the results wasn’t on the channel or email at the same time?

- Bob -

I personally find email good for things which need well thought out, reasoned comments. IRC is good for rapid, on the spot discussion.

Communicating is hard. Communicating over an asynchronous, high-density textual channel is better from the recipients PoV, rather than from the PoV of the sender.

Voice is good for decisions with necessarily high emotional content. Voice breaks flow. Breaking flow is fatal to anything which needs state maintainance in the mind.

FWIW,
Plain text email is high bandwidth, high latency communication.
HTML email is lower bandwidth, high latency communication.
IRC (or IM conference rooms) are low bandwidth, low latency communication channels.
Voice is low bandwidth, low latency for data, high bandwidth, low latency for emotions.

I love IM, Google docs, I used trending tools like Yammer and even IRC (old school)

I hate phone and skype calls, they force you to quit what you are doing and answer the call.

What do you use?

- Bob -

Cedric.

Email itself isn’t bad – the misuse of email is what’s bad!

Oh, hey Adam. Sorry, I didn’t know you were at the next desk over Only kidding.

- Bob -

I don’t think that it is always bad though. Sometimes I find it really helpful to put my thoughts down in a structured manner in an email. It helps get my head around my concerns and also generally leads to a structured response.

- Bob -