Morning!
You free?
Three minutes gone, and still no idea what this is about. Nobody was unfriendly. The request simply never arrived.
Morning! Hope the move went alright. Quick one when you surface: could you check the Q3 figures before Thursday? Nothing needed today.
Same warmth, one message. They know what is wanted, by when, and that they can finish their sentence first.
Put the ask, the context and the urgency in the first message. Send your hello in that same message rather than instead of it.
That is the whole idea. It is not a ban on saying hello, and it costs nothing to adopt. The guide is everything around it: why the habit is worth the bother, the objection that it makes teams cold, and how to get a team to actually do it.
The work gets done. Somebody pays for it anyway.
Gloria Mark and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, have spent years observing people at work. Getting properly back into an interrupted task takes somewhere over twenty minutes, and usually several other things get in the way first. Treat that as a rough finding from watching real offices rather than a precise constant.
The part almost nobody quotes is what that recovery costs the person doing it. The same research measured stress, frustration, time pressure and effort, and all of them went up. Almost nobody counts how many times a day they get pulled out of their work, so nothing ever prompts anyone to fix it.
It lands harder when the message comes from a manager, and harder again on people who find uncertainty genuinely difficult. The guide has a section on who this helps most, including the colleagues least likely to mention it.
Enough people recognised this that we wrote it down
This started as a short post on LinkedIn. It has since been seen by more than 180,000 people, and over 600 have reacted, replied or passed it on.
The replies are the interesting part. Most people did not agree in the abstract, they described what these messages had cost them: a weekend lost to a Friday afternoon “got a moment Monday?”, a task that never came back after one ambiguous ping, an email read as criticism that took hours to shake off. Two of those replies shaped the guide, and the objections got a section of their own rather than a brush-off.
Get the guide
Twelve pages. Written for a team rather than for managers, so you do not need anyone's permission to adopt it.
- The norm, and policy text you can paste straight into a handbook
- Urgency levels that stop people interrupting to find out whether they should interrupt
- A cheat sheet of six real messages, before and after
- The honest answer to “this does not fit every team”
- Who this helps most, including colleagues who are unlikely to tell you
- Where the norm does not apply, because a rule that fits everything fits nothing
- How you would actually know whether it worked