Priority instant messaging for developers to communicate

Question

My team communicates a lot with IM. Sometimes we will use IM to ask a question even to someone who is in the next cube. The reason for this is that we all find that the response to IM is much less damaging than the spoken one.

However, I found that the blinking message box may break while encoding the header. I cannot help but look at what people wrote, and this often prevents me from completing my thought. This type of multitasking is a killer of productivity. So I turned off the warning function (I use Pidgin). The Windows taskbar is hidden, so I need to drag the cursor to the bottom of the screen so that the taskbar pops up and see if the pin-track icon blinks orange to find out about new messages.

This works well, except that sometimes people have a quick question, why do they need a quick answer.

It would be great to be able to send priorities to messages:

Priority 3: Check it out when you can
Priority 2: Conventional Chat
Priority 1: Respond Fast

The priority level will then be used to determine the warning method. For instance. (1) Give focus to the window, (2) blink in the taskbar, (3) blink in the tray.

Any ideas on a simple way to achieve this?

thanks

Answer 1

We use email or internal twitter for your priority 3.

We use IM for priority 2.

We are using the desktop transition for Priority 1.

Edit: Sorry, I did not understand that you were asking a question about implementation. If you do not want to introduce new rules / standards for contact methods (ala, introducing an internal twitter or the like), you need to standardize everyone in the office in one application / IM protocol. And then you will need to change it. Trying to add something to the jabber specification (if it doesn't have this, I don't know) will be tedious and not worth the effort.

If you really wanted to continue this route, you probably would be better off moving to IRC and using scripts to alert you if people are talking to you while they reach their message in pounds! or something similar.

Answer 2

I think that as soon as you enter the "priority message" function, all messages will begin to be high priority. Human nature. I simply set my status to “busy” and do not respond to messages that appear when I am “busy” if it is not important. People quickly realize this.

Answer 3

As long as I agree with the statement that it can make certain messages a higher priority, it will result in ALL messages being high priority , you can always just turn off IM, and then people will have to talk to you. If they are on your team, they need to know when you are heads-up and take on some personal responsibility in order to make a decision to upset you.

Answer 4

I'm doing pretty much the same thing as Codingscape - I set my status to Away. Many clients will display a message “away” when your status changes, so I just use “I'm very busy” or a similar message.