@here considered harmful

You should never, ever post an @here, @channel, or @everyone in Slack, or Discord, or Teams, or HipChat, or Mattermost. When you do this, you turn an asynchronous communication tool into a synchronous one. You interrupt everyone’s day and night regardless of what time zone they are in.

It is completely incompatible with working Remote, as we all are. See It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work by DHH and Jason Fried — use asynchronous communication tools. I work 9 to 5 in Toronto, you work 10 to 6 in Fiji, don’t message me at 6pm Fiji time, and certainly don’t message everyone in the company at 6pm Fiji time to tell them that bran muffins contain bran.

A regular message is a sufficient unit of communication for virtually anything. Trust me — it will be duly considered when its time comes.

In economics there’s the concept of signalling, assuming that hasn’t been ruined by ignorant randos asserting that virtue is a bad thing to signal. What you signal when you @channel a trite quotidian message is that you are so much more busy than anyone else could possible be, and I couldn’t care less as to how busy you might be. Stop pretending to be busy, respect my time, and I’ll respect yours.

Cover of the “It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work” book

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