The problem

Working remotely requires efficient communication sharing with your teammates. This works best if you boil down information to it’s most essential form, and requires unlearning some quirks of in-person communication that can slow down this process.

When you start an in-person conversation, it’s perfectly normal to say “Hello” and wait for the other person to say hi back to you. When communicating digitally, however, this makes me lose focus from my current task and switch to the chat window, where I will respond with a “Hey” and then wait for you to type what you wanted to say.

The solution

If you message me, instead of saying “Hello”, give me the information that I need to give you a useful response. You could say something like “Hi Gyan, I’m working on X, can you help me with Y?” or if you want to get on a call, “Hey Gyan, do you have X minutes to chat about Y item?”

This lets me look at your message and respond immediately, and saves both of us some back and forth.

See more about nohello

The concept of nohello has been around since internet chat has been around. There are a few different sites that inspired me to create this page.

Some people are a little more radical about this and refuse to answer a hello message if it has no other context. I’m less rigid about it, but I might send you this page so both of us can communicate more effectively. Happy texting from home!