Interesting discussion this morning with Sharon Bellamy on availability. If you put your Sametime on ‘Do Not Disturb’ the system will offer you to send an e-mail instead.
So how is that not disturbing? Isn’t sending an e-mail just another way of demanding attention and a reply?
Funny, I always thought it to be a good alternative but at the same time I realize that most people who put their Sametime on ‘Do Not Disturb’ and instead get an e-mail from someone will (if they haven’t deactivated that) get an audible or visible ‘New mail’ indicator about just as fast as they would see the chat window popping up. Demanding their attention and distracting them from what it was they were doing, that caused them to put the Sametime on ‘Do Not Disturb’ in the first place…
Why do we see the ‘Do Not Disturb’ indication on Sametime as just a ‘Do Not Chat’ and not as a (like it actually says) indication of us not wanting to be disturbed in any way…even if by mail? Or should we change that text to ‘Not available for chat’ instead?
Nice example of how the internet and hyper-connectability is really changing our perception of language concepts.
While thinking about it it would be nice to ask if you temporarily want to disable E-Mail notifications while in “Do not disturb” mode.
In general I consider EMail non-disruptive and like the possibility to send someone message.
I agree, I normally don’t mind if people instead send me an email and I’ve deactivated all my visible and audible notifications anyway so I can focus. But if you do normally have those on it would be nice to have a preference option to automatically disable those as well on setting your Sametime to “Do Not Disturb”.