You're at your computer, doing your work, minding your own business.

You hear a ping from Slack, Teams, or whatever it is you use.

The message reads, "Hey."

You've done this dance before.

You reply with, "Hey."

And then they tell you what they wanted to originally tell you.

This is such a waste of time that I have to share how I’ve avoided suffering from this.

I think I might have gotten this idea from Cal Newport's book, Digital Minimalism.

What I started doing is this: for those coworkers who won’t reply unless you "Hey" them back, I just ignore them.

Unless your coworker is a legitimate psychopath who will run up to your desk and yell at you for this, there’s no downside.

There are 2 possible outcomes here.

▵ The person gets tired of waiting for you to reply "Hey" back and just tells you what they wanted to say.

▵ The even better option: they never reach out to you again.

Either way, you win.

What doesn’t happen is you suffering a staggered interruption to your workday and training your coworkers to annoy you twice in a row.

I swear to God, this works.

Next time someone says, "Hey," and you know they’re expecting you to say "Hey" back, just don’t write anything.

See what happens.

If you do have one of those psychopath coworkers who’ve gotten angry at you for this, please reply to this email and let me know.


And if you’re a person who has all notifications set up on Slack, Teams, desktop, and mobile, check out my course, The Sane Tech Worker’s OS.

I share my full notification setup for work so that I avoid burnout and being overwhelmed, along with a lot more systems to make sure you actually log off and keep your sanity.

Till next time,

Kevin Tejada