My personal practice has made a massive change recently – I am now mostly telecommuting for all of my clients. This means that my primary modes of interaction are IM, email and telephone. My absolute favorite mode is IM (I use MSN IM).
Occasionally I deal with people who refuse to use IM. Their reason is usually that they hate the interruptions. The usual storey is that they install IM, hook in all their friends and then they are bombarded with constant IMs from people.
The trick w/ IM is management. There are occasions where I’ll have 5 or 6 people trying to IM me at once. If I’m busy I just minimize the window and ignore it. I also set my status to busy; most of my friends respect that (if they don’t don’t I’ll block them until I’m not busy anymore). Also, set an away message telling people to email you.
The thing that I like about IM is that it is somewhere between a phone call or in person visit and email. Phone calls and visits are strong interruptions. Well – I’m good at ignoring phones while they ring – that is what voice mail is for. But a person walking in your office is hard to ignore (I try, I really do). An email is a weak interruption, it just quietly waits in the background. I check email three times a day and I have outlook’s notification thing turned off. I check first thing in the morning, lunch and in the evening.
IM is easy to ignore, but it provides a quick way to talk to a person when you are ready. IM can be a slow conversation. I’ve had an IM conversation last 3 hours with maybe eight exchanges back and fourth. A friend IM’d me asking a question. I was busy at the moment, about ten minutes later I asked a few questions about his question. An hour later he responded. I was in a meeting at that time. When I got back his question required me to look up a few things but I finally responded about an hour after his response. That type of exchange isn’t unusual for me.
In this fashion IM is great. You can ask a person a question, walk off and come back and the answer will be there. If you call them you have to sit there on the phone until you get what you need. If you send them an email and they manage email like I do (and I think everybody should) then it is possible you’ll wait up to three hours for a response.
To help control interruptions set your IM to invite only (meaning people have to get your permission to add you as a contact) and don’t be afraid to set your status to ‘appear offline’.
It seems odd to me to write something like this at this point in time. Back in 2000 sure, but in 2007 nearly 2008? For my kids IM won’t even be a question. IM and Txting are already preferred communications channels. Frankly, it makes sense to me. I guess I’m saying the rest of you are running the edge of becoming curmudgeons.