IM vice
Webworker daily ran an article on how IM’s are better than emails for work-life productivity. Well, even though IM’s have their advantages, the two most important disadvantages which, I believe overshadow the advantages are:
1.IM’s are one of the biggest distractors, they make you lose your train of thought and force you to multitask, which drags down productivity effectively. What I mean is, suppose you are completely focussed on one task, and someone pings you( inspite of the fact, that you’ve set your status to Busy), you’re forced to pay attention to the IM message, that leads to context switch, which is counter-productive.
2. IM messages cannot be archived properly, so, IM’s cannot be used to make business decisions. Even if the IM client can store messages, its difficult to scour through the chat history, to find the relevant conversation.
I don’t find IM’s useful, other than having a quick chat with my friends online.
The company I work with uses Skype pervasively for both IM and transatlantic VoIP calls. The way to deal with distractors is to set yourself to busy/invisible. Archiving is not for IM, we typically use emails to send documents, and then it goes into source control.
Use Gtalk. Has got a lot lean and clean User interface as compared to Yahoo! IM, and it archieves all chats neatly. ANt its open sourced XMPP protocol can be used by other customized IM’s as well.
Harshad/Dmitri,
Thanks for your input….Your answers still don’t resolve the issue of breaking the flow of a programmer….Inspite of all the virtues of IM, it will still be a botheration when he/she is totally involved in some task, which needs high level of concentration.
I think the solution lies in being offline while completing some important work…but then again, IM would be no different than your mail client.
Anup