Async etiquette

Chat is not conversation with typing. It is a shared inbox. Treat it like email that happens to be fast: complete asks, public by default, and a medium that matches how urgent the work actually is.

The big idea

A "hi" that waits for "hi?" holds the other person's attention hostage. They context-switch, you have not asked anything yet, and a round trip is gone. Put the question in the first message. A greeting is fine with the ask.

The analogy is leaving a voicemail vs ringing and staying silent. The analogy breaks for true emergencies: if production is down, page; do not write a perfect paragraph.

Walking through it

No hello-only pings. "Hi — do you know when the payments flag rolls out? Need it for a load test Thursday." is one message. "yt?" and "quick question" without the question are the same anti-pattern. See no hello.

Front-load context. What you tried, what you need, links, deadline, urgency. Enough to answer without a follow-up.

Use threads. Keep channels scannable. Parent: "Checkout latency investigation — findings." Detail in the thread. @-mention people in the thread, not the whole channel, unless it is a broadcast.

Choose the channel by audience. Team channel for team work; a shared channel for cross-team asks; DM only when the content is personal, confidential or noisy. Public by default makes work discoverable.

Match urgency to medium. Slack is for hours. A calendar invite or doc comment is for days. Paging is for production pain. If it can wait for standup, do not interrupt deep work with a red badge.

If the answer will still matter in a month, put it in a doc and link it. Slack is a river; docs are a lake. When you decide in a thread, paste the decision the same day: "2026-03-12: chose sticky sessions for websocket hosts; revisit if we shard by org."

PR descriptions are the same skill. Three sections usually suffice: why, what changed, how you tested. Large diffs without narrative tax the whole team — see code review.

Common mistakes

• Hello-only, then a wait. You burned a round trip and their focus.
• Forty-line paste in a busy channel. Headline, thread, doc.
• Decision amnesia. You chose X in Slack; nobody can find it next month. Paste it into the living doc.

Check yourself

1. What belongs in message one of an async ask?

The question, what you tried, links, deadline and urgency — enough to answer without a follow-up.

2. Slack or a doc: you just picked sticky sessions for websocket hosts. Where does the decision live?

In the living doc the same day, with a date and a revisit trigger. Slack can link to it.

Key takeaways

• Full ask in message one. Greeting plus question is fine; greeting alone is not.
• Threads and public channels keep work searchable.
• Match medium to urgency; file decisions where people will search.

Further learning

no helloplease donnohello.net

Next: audience altitude.