Instant Messaging With Priority For Developer Communication

Question

My team communicates a lot with IM. We'll sometimes use IM to ask a question even to someone who's in the next cube over. The reason for this is that we all find that answering an IM is much less disrupting than talking.

Still, I find that the blinking message window can be disrupting when I'm heads down coding. I can't help but look at what people have written and it often keeps me from finishing my thought. This type of multitasking is a productivity killer. I've therefore turned off the alert feature (I'm using Pidgin). My Windows task bar is hidden so I need to drag my cursor to the bottom of the screen, let the task bar pop up, and look if the pidgin tray icon is flashing orange to find out about new messages.

This works well except that sometimes people have a quick question to ask for which they need a quick answer.

It would be great to have the ability to send priorities on messages:

Priority 3: Check this out when you can
Priority 2: Normal chat
Priority 1: Please reply quickly

The priority level would then be used to determine the alert method. E.g. (1)Give focus to window, (2)blink in task bar, (3)blink in tray.

Any ideas on an easy way of accomplishing this?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think that as soon as you introduce a "priority message" function, all messages will start to be high priority. Human nature. I just set my status to "busy" and don't reply to messages that come in when i'm "busy" unless it is important. People get the point quickly.

Answer 2

While I agree with the statement that being able to make certain messages a higher priority will result in ALL messages being high-priority, you can always just shut off the IM, and then people will have to actually talk to you. If they are on your team, they should know when you are heads-down, and take some personal responsibility in making the decision to disrupt you.

Answer 3

I do roughly the same thing that Codingscape does - I set my status to Away. Many clients will display an 'away text' message when your status changes, so I just use "I'm very busy" or a similar message.

Answer 4

We use e-mail or internal twitter for your Priority 3.

We use IM for Priority 2.

We use walking over to someone's desk for Priority 1.

Edit: I'm sorry I didn't realize you were asking an implementation question. If you didn't want to institute new policies/standards for methods of contact (ala introducing an internal twitter or the like), you would need to standardize everyone in the office on the same IM application/protocol. And then you'd need to modify one. Trying to add something into the jabber spec (if it doesn't have it, I don't know) would be tedious and not worth the effort.

If you really wanted to pursue that route, you would probably be better off moving to IRC and using scripts to alert you if people talk to you while preceding their message with a pound! or something similar.